Personal Foul. Tim Donaghy
how it went with referee after referee, player after player, team after team. Some referees hated Mark Cuban, the outspoken owner of the Dallas Mavericks. Others despised Robert Sarver, owner of the Phoenix Suns. Depending on which officiating crew worked their games, those teams could be in for a long night.
My system took various factors into account, including injuries to players, game venues, and specific directives from the league office, just to name a few. However, my picks were based mostly on my knowledge of which referees were working a game. Each game day, the NBA prepared a master list of referee assignments. The list was private and was not made available to anyone in advance other than the referees and a few high-ranking league officials. That list was virtually all I needed.
Of course, not everyone knew the details of the referees’ relationships with players, coaches, and teams. But I did. I knew the referees who had personal vendetta against a player or a coach. I also had an inside advantage because of my access to pregame meetings. It was common for my fellow referees to voice their opinions about who they expected to win on a given night. Those opinions were often based on their knowledge of confidential inside information pertaining to players and teams, such as injury reports unknown to the general public.
I would take all the information I could find and create my own betting line for games. Initially, I did it for games I didn’t referee, and then, to my greater shame, games that I did referee. I compared the line I created with the betting line in USA Today. If there was a disparity of more than three points, Jack and I would bet the game. It sounds astonishing to some, but we won 70 to 80 percent of our bets. Great results for sure, but astonishing? Not to me.
If Jack and I had bet exclusively on NBA games, we would have made a fortune. But we weren’t satisfied with stopping there; we bet on virtually every sport we could. We would bet on 15 NFL games, a dozen college football games, or anything and everything else that had a line. On other sports, we were up some and down some—generally more down than up, like most sports bettors. But when it came to the NBA, our bets were golden. Every now and then we would come to our senses and say, “This is stupid. Let’s not do this anymore. We’re crossing the line here.” And then we would stop betting on NBA games for a while. Eventually, one of us would go to a casino and lose $10,000 or $15,000, and all of a sudden we were back in business.
I didn’t realize that Jack was telling other people about our unholy alliance, but he was. Jack placed our bets with a bookie named Pete Ruggieri, who was excited to say the least when Jack told him about me. I can just imagine the look on Ruggieri’s face when Jack told him he was getting his picks from an NBA referee. Talk about winning the lottery—Ruggieri probably had a new Rolex on his wrist and a shiny Caddy in the driveway before Jack got the words out of his mouth. I can’t believe how naïve I was when I occasionally reminded Jack not to tell anyone what we were doing. I never thought it would go any further than the two of us.
But as usually happens in situations like this, Ruggieri was so giddy over his newfound good fortune that he had to share it with someone else. He gave the information to—you guessed it—James “Ba Ba” Battista, and although I was not aware of it at the time, Ba Ba and his crew immediately began to secretly bet along with us, initially placing $25,000 a game on my picks. Why did Ruggieri have to tell Ba Ba, of all people? Why couldn’t he tell a stripper during a lap dance or share a little pillow talk with his mistress? No, it had to be Ba Ba!
Finally, in early November of 2006, I just said, “Jack, I don’t feel comfortable doing this anymore. Let’s quit. We’re never going to do this again.” Jack understood, but then word traveled down the line that I was no longer making picks. Jack told Ruggieri, who in turn told Ba Ba.
That’s when Tommy Martino started calling repeatedly to tell me that Ba Ba wanted to talk about something important. At that point, I didn’t know Ba Ba was connected to the Gambinos, and I didn’t know that he had been using my picks to make bets of his own. I didn’t know exactly why he wanted to talk to me, but I figured he was going to get me in trouble. Later, I learned from the FBI that Ba Ba had been making millions on my picks. So that’s why, on the night of December 12, 2006, Tommy and Ba Ba turned up in a four-door Honda at the Marriott Hotel in Philadelphia.
As soon as I saw Battista, I thought to myself, Oh shit, nothing good is going to come of this. I debated turning around and going back into the hotel, but I decided I might as well get it over with and hear what they had to say. I was shocked by how much Ba Ba had changed since high school. He was a blob of a man, nothing like his days of bulging muscles and tight-fitted shirts. Then the terrible thought ran through my mind: I wonder if he knows what I’ve been doing. That’s when it hit me. He wasn’t there to catch up on old times. He was there for one reason only: to put the squeeze on me, to shake me down.
Tommy started driving, telling me that he needed something at the convenience store. As he drove, Ba Ba turned to me and said quietly, “We know what’s been going on.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“We know you’ve been giving information to Jack,” Ba Ba said. “Jack’s been booking his bets with Pete, and Pete’s been telling us.”
Suddenly, I was sick to my stomach. I didn’t know where this was going, but I knew I was in a major jam. It was a cold winter night in Philadelphia, but I felt like sweat was pouring down my forehead.
“You’re better off going through me,” Ba Ba said. “You don’t want the NBA to find out about this.”
The NBA? In my mind, Jack and I had already stopped betting on NBA games; it was over, a thing of the past. Now, suddenly, Ba Ba was trying to drag me back into it, but on a much bigger scale. There’s got to be some way out of this, I thought, but as I sat in the back of that car, I was numb. We reached the convenience store, Tommy and I went in, and I immediately laid into him.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I asked angrily. “Bringing him down to me?”
“Tim, he’s like a wart up my ass,” Tommy responded. “I can’t get rid of him.” I just shook my head.
Tommy bought a ChapStick or something like that and we got back in the car and returned to the Marriott. We went straight to the restaurant, but I was so nauseated that I couldn’t eat. Ba Ba, however, ordered 10 appetizers and the table was quickly covered with platters of food.
They told me how we were going to set the whole thing up. “For every correct pick you give me, I’ll give you $2,000,” Ba Ba explained. “By the way, it’s going to be 2,000 ‘apples.’ From now on, we talk about money, it’s ‘apples.’ It’ll be 2,000 ‘apples’ for you, and 2,000 for Martino over there.”
“Ba Ba,” I explained desperately, “I can’t do this. This is going to get me in a lot of trouble.”
Ba Ba looked me right in the eye. “You don’t want anyone from New York visiting your wife and kids in Florida, do you?” he asked, his threat hanging in the air.
Right then and there, I knew it was take it or leave it. He was willing to drag my wife and kids into it. I wasn’t sure if the threat was real or not, but he seemed very serious that night and I wasn’t going to take any chances.
After dinner, the waitress brought the bill to the table. It was like a scene straight out of The Sopranos: Ba Ba pulled a folded wad of greenbacks wrapped with a rubber band out of his duffel bag and peeled off enough cash to pay the $150 bill and leave a $100 tip.
“You’re coming to Martino’s house tomorrow,” Ba Ba demanded, “and you’re going to tell us how to bet the game tomorrow night, Philly against Boston.”
I was scheduled to referee that game—that’s why I was in town. And now this. The entire time they were eating, I was looking around the restaurant, afraid that somebody might recognize me and the two thugs at my table.
After dinner, I headed to my hotel room knowing that I had been hooked by Ba Ba. At that very moment, I understood