Personal Foul. Tim Donaghy
right up to me. Damn it, why me? Did I have “NBA REF IN DEEP SHIT” written on my forehead?
“You look familiar,” he casually said while thoroughly looking me over. “Where are you from? Would you like to fill out an information card?” I pretended that my cell phone was ringing and promptly excused myself.
George’s lucky streak continued and he tossed me a $1,000 chip. I played the next hand and won. By that time it might as well have been Monopoly money. Nothing was real anymore, except the laughs and the kick I was getting from the adrenaline rush. We were eight guys at the table—eight guys with $1,000 chips up to their chins.
“Deal the cards, mister,” I cracked. “I’ve gotta be home by six or my wife will have my ass.”
With $150,000 in his pockets, George’s day was through. We shut it down and headed straight for the dining room, arms around each other’s shoulders. Supper was a veritable orgy of food and drink. Appetizers of fried calamari, oysters, clams on the half-shell, and stuffed mushroom caps were followed by fresh Brazilian lobster tails, jumbo prawns from northern California, and 16-ounce king-cut prime ribs, medium rare. The dinner bill was over $3,000 for the eight of us—compliments of the very good luck of our good friend George. We were all stuffed, collectively a modern-day tribute to the gluttony and excess of Roman soldiers on holiday in some faraway conquered land.
We crawled to our cars and drove back to Philly reliving the moments of glory ad nauseam. I pulled up to my house with 10 minutes to spare and went inside.
“How was the golf?” Kim asked.
“Good, I really kicked Jack’s ass, but George was unbelievable. He couldn’t lose,” I replied.
“Hope you’re hungry, I made your favorite: Tuna Helper,” Kim boasted.
I sat down for dinner that night with two things on my mind. First, that I couldn’t swallow another bite if my life depended on it. Second, I wondered if I could get out of the house the next day and coax the boys into another road trip. Can you believe that? I hadn’t even come down from that day’s high and I was already looking for more action. Unbelievable!
On a warm day in October of 2002, Jack and I were sitting around the clubhouse at Radley Run Golf Course after playing a big-money match against a couple of friends. It was football season and we were talking about an acquaintance of ours named Pete Ruggieri. Ruggieri had attended high school with Jack and still lived in the Philadelphia suburbs. Back in those days, he was a big football star for Bonner, a nose guard with the tenacity of a pit bull. At 5’7” and 250 pounds with orange-red hair, he definitely stood out in any crowd. Ruggieri was married with four kids, but didn’t have a job—at least not a 9-to-5 job. Pete Ruggieri was a professional gambler; that’s how he supported himself and his family. It was working out quite well for him, though. He had a nice house in a nice neighborhood and a summer home at the Jersey Shore.
Like the rest of us, Ruggieri loved to play golf, and he would frequently join us for a round of 18 holes. Jack and Pete had a much closer friendship than Jack and I did. They both belonged to the same country club and had remained friends since high school.
When we played on Fridays, Pete was constantly on his cell phone, always excusing himself to take a “business call.” I asked Jack about all the calls and that’s when he told me that Pete was a professional gambler, a bookie—and a good one at that. I knew that Jack liked to bet on college and pro football—he was always looking at the point spreads in the newspaper. He told me he would bet 15 college games on Thursday and Saturday and another 15 NFL games on Sunday.
“I get the picks from Pete,” he told me. “What do you say we go in together as partners?”
My first thought was my contract with the NBA. I was not supposed to gamble, plain and simple. I never really looked at a friendly golf wager or a trip to the casino as a big deal, but illegal sports betting was a totally different can of worms. But then I started thinking—or should I say, rationalizing: Shit, everyone on the staff bets. If gambling was so wrong, why were NBA referees regularly betting on NCAA football pools and frequenting casinos around the country? The behavior of most NBA referees was the opposite of what the league expected of us, so I convinced myself there must be nothing wrong with a little betting. I thought back to our preseason meetings where some 50 NBA refs played a high-stakes game of Liar’s Poker in a hotel bar. We all sat around the table, watching and laughing as hundreds of dollars passed hands.
Yes, Jack’s invitation was too good to pass up. Like a pot smoker moving up to cocaine, I was making a dangerous leap to the sleazy world of sports betting. The ride would be fast and exhilarating, and ultimately it would cost me everything. But that wasn’t on my mind back then. No sir, I was having the time of my life, and the odds appeared to be in my favor.
We did well that first weekend. My share of the winnings was $1,100, and I remember saying to Jack, “This is unbelievable! It’s easy money!” I was hooked, and from that moment on we bet games every weekend. In addition to football, we expanded our partnership to include baseball and hockey. We didn’t make money every week; our fortunes went up and down like a casino elevator shuttling its patrons back and forth from the slots to the cots.
I knew Jack was getting the picks from Pete—that was understood. But Pete was never supposed to know that I was placing bets along with Jack. I was a silent partner; I had too much at stake to go around telling anyone that I was a big sports bettor. I trusted Jack with my life and never imagined he would be flapping his jaw about me. Well, he wasn’t—at least not until much later when we took another huge leap.
The gambling got so infectious that we always found a justification for continuing, even when we were getting killed. If Pete gave us bad picks on three or four consecutive games, I would tell Jack, “He’s not gonna lose five in a row. Let’s triple the next bet.” We would bump the bet up to $5,000 on the game, watching every play on television as if our lives depended on it. And wouldn’t you know it, we would win and recoup our previous losses. When Pete was hot, he was smoking! The money came pouring in so fast that I could barely keep up. We had no idea what system Pete was using, and we didn’t care. Jack and I joked that it might have been, “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.”
For the next three and a half years, I was consumed with gambling. I made bets every day. Even at home, I was preoccupied with betting: blackjack games in my card room, analyzing the betting lines in various newspapers, or checking game scores on television and on my laptop. Heck, if the kids couldn’t agree on whose turn it was to walk the dog, we rolled dice to pick a loser. I had a short fuse in those days, pacing around like an alley cat in heat, waiting for the games to go final, calculating wins and losses in my mind. On weekends, Jack and I would be on the phone 10 to 20 times a day, sharing updates and planning our next move. Kim would say that I seemed on edge. If she had only known the kind of money—our money—I was playing around with. On edge? Baby, I was over the edge, staring into the black abyss, clinging to the magic powers of a short fat guy with red hair and hoping, always hoping, for a big score.
When we won, Jack would deliver my share before we teed off for a round of golf or over a plate of linguini in clam sauce at some cheap diner. He would give me a wad of bills under the table or wrapped in a linen napk in—sometimes as much as $5,000 or $10,000. On one occasion I met him at Philadelphia International Airport, where I was catching a flight to the West Coast to ref a game. He handed me $6,000 in twenties and fifties and I thought, How will I get this through security? I started stuffing wads of cash into my socks and underwear and quietly passed by the TSA agents with a grin on my face and a sigh of relief.
There were times I was so flush with cash that I didn’t know what to do with it. I would blow it as fast as I could on hotels, golf outings, blackjack at the casino, and any card game I could find. I bought luxury items for our house, diamonds for my wife, new suits for myself, and toys for the kids. I even purchased basketball shoes for everyone in our neighborhood. If they had only known where the money was coming from…