Gaming the Game

by Sean Patrick Griffin

  Battista says he does not recall a discernible pattern in Donaghy’s picks vis-à-vis home/away, favorite/underdog. An independent review of bets placed by Battista in an unrepresentative sample of Donaghy games during the scandal suggests he was more likely to bet favorites.

  The FBI’s summary of Tommy Martino’s version of these events similarly states: “Occasionally, in the beginning, Donaghy provided picks for some games he was not refereeing. After a few losses, though, Baba did not want any more of those games.” Martino estimated that they bet a total of 37 games, which included the few non-Donaghy games, and that their record was 27-and-10.

  It was the first time Sin City hosted the game, and Las Vegas sportsbooks agreed not to take action on the game as part of the city’s agreement with the NBA. The West squad beat the East 153-132, and the officials were Monty McCutchen, Mike Callahan, and Sean Corbin.

  Battista’s calculations are as follows: high estimate = $5,000 (start up) + $4,000 (first 2 games @ $2,000) + $30,000 (3 schmagas @ $10,000) + $160,000 (32 games @ $5,000) + $5,000 (2007 All-Star Game) + $5,000 (non-Donaghy game) = $209,000; low estimate = $5,000 (start up) + $6,000 (first 3 games @ $2,000) + $20,000 (2 schmagas @ $10,000) + $160,000 (32 games @ $5,000) + $5,000 (2007 All-Star Game) + $5,000 (non-Donaghy game) = $201,000. While Battista recalls “two or three” schmaga games, Tommy Martino told the FBI there was perhaps only one schmaga.

  Tommy Martino told the FBI that he gave Tim Donaghy between $115,000 and $120,000 over six payments between mid-January and early April 2007.

  The Dance

  ABOUT A WEEK after Jimmy Battista got out of rehab, he took his kids and his younger sister to nearby Valley Forge Park. They left the vast historic park at about three o’clock in the afternoon, and as they drove up Battista’s street, they passed a white minivan parked a few doors down from his home. As his kids and sister hopped out of his car, Battista watched the minivan, which had New Jersey tags, park right in front of his house. “Two white guys in suits got out and started walking towards me,” Battista says, “and before they ever introduced themselves, I knew who they were. I asked my sister to take the kids inside, because I knew these weren’t Avon salesmen. I didn’t know why they wanted to talk to me, and didn’t really think about the NBA thing, but I knew I owed people a lot of money and that anything was possible. After they introduced themselves, they said they needed to talk to me. I asked them, ‘Can we please meet somewhere else because my kids are here.’ They were polite and asked where would be a good place, and I said there was a Dunkin Donuts nearby. I got in my minivan, went to the Dunkin Donuts, and sat down.”

  FBI Special Agents Paul N. Harris and Gerard “Gerry” Conrad operated out of New York, and were part of the Bureau’s Gambino squad, charged with investigating the legendary “crime family.” Harris, the case (lead) agent for the burgeoning NBA betting probe, and Conrad were a considerable distance from their squad’s office (and its mission, as they later discovered) when they met with Jimmy Battista in April 2007.

  “When they arrived at the Dunkin Donuts,” Battista says, “they offered to buy me a cup of coffee, but I said I would pay for me and for them. I didn’t let them pay for the coffee not because they were FBI agents, but because I never wanted to owe anybody anything. Denise always said I had a problem with that, and it’s true. When I went to pay for the coffees, I reached into my pocket and pulled out my ‘wallet.’ I had a rubber band that wrapped around my driver’s license, room keys for Vegas hotels, my social security card, and whatever cash I had on me. I never carried credit cards, and always used cash. Back when I was in my early twenties when I was working at September’s Place on a Sunday morning, I got a call that my dad was jumped—robbed—and was in the hospital. He was at a train station reaching into his back pocket to pull out his wallet to get his train pass, and these guys beat the shit out of him and took his wallet. They put him in the hospital for eleven fucking dollars. I never carried a wallet since, and always kept my money and everything else in my front pocket. Well, both agents’ eyes stared at my ‘wallet,’ checking to see how much money I was holding, even though I only had like twenty-six bucks on me.

  “After they reintroduced themselves as part of a crime unit up in New York, their approach to me was really sharp. They said, ‘We know you lost a lot of money and we’ll protect you in case someone comes after you.’ My response was, ‘Protect me? Who do you think I owe money to?!’ They said the word on the street was that I owed money to The Chinaman, Zorba, and some other guys. ‘That you didn’t pay them and you just drifted away.’ They knew their real names, their nicknames, their professions, and pretty much had the dollar figure I owed correct. It was unbelievable. I told them that I really had nothing to say, and that I would like to have a lawyer present if I was going to speak with them. They said, ‘Well, come with us and we’ll work that out, and there’s another matter we’d like to talk to you about. We know you move games, and we know you’re a bettor. Were you working with anyone on NBA or NFL games?’ I told them, ‘I bet a lot of sports, and I deal with a lot of handicappers. They give me the information and I go bet them.’ They said, ‘Are you sure you didn’t have any particular customers or people that you dealt with on a daily basis?’ I said, ‘Well, there’s a lot of people I dealt with on a daily basis. I dealt with a lot of handicappers. You obviously know some of them, because you just told me I owed them millions of dollars.’ They said, ‘We think you are involved in a scandal and that you were behind it. You should be talking to us.’

  “I didn’t know what they were getting at. Besides Elvis and the NBA, I had a lot of good inside information on the NFL; not as good as Elvis, but some incredible information on injuries and stuff like that I used to get before anybody else. People in my line of work knew I was involved in that aspect of everything. I told the agents I needed to obtain the services of a lawyer before saying anything else to them, and they handed me papers and told me I’d be going before a grand jury. The whole thing was very cordial, and they gave me their business cards before we all left. I always thought before I went into rehab that I was being followed, and now I knew I was.”

  On the short drive home, Battista was more focused on how to handle the situation than he was nervous. Before phoning anyone, he simply waited for Denise to get home from cosmetology school so he could tell her first. “She was understandably upset,” Battista says, “and our marriage was already on the rocks because I was more concerned about gambling and drugs the past few years than I was about my family. Now she knew I blew all of our savings and more; all of our money was gone . I told her that I had to alert certain people about the feds visiting me.”

  After putting the kids to bed that night, Battista drove to use a pay phone and call various people who would need to know what was happening. At a minimum, he wanted to alert people that his phones were probably tapped. Up next was obtaining the services of a lawyer. “The guy I used before was also Joe Vito’s lawyer,” Battista says, “so I couldn’t use him because I assumed this had something to do with Joe, going back to his arrest and the money seizure.” The following morning, Battista drove into Center City, Philadelphia, to see a friend of his named Lucky, who was a ticket broker. “He was a great guy and a good friend whose brother-in-law was a chef who used to work with me and Louie the Lump,” Battista says. “I’d use Lucky to get tickets when I would wine and dine people or take my wife and kids to games and concerts. I’d spend thousands of dollars a year just in getting good tickets. Lucky was a well-respected guy who knew a lot of the right people, and he would always tell me that if I ever got jammed up to come and see him. So, I paid him a visit and he told me to go see a well-known defense lawyer named Jack McMahon. Of course, before I left he gave me tickets to a Phillies game because he felt bad for me and thought it would be good to take the kids to a ball game!”

  When Battista got back home that afternoon, he arrived to find FBI agents Harris and Conrad waiting for him. “They pretty much sa
id the same thing as the day before,” Battista says. “They said, ‘We want to give you another opportunity to work with us,’ and I said, ‘Well, that ain’t gonna happen.’ They told me they understood and that they’d be in touch. They were very cordial and asked about how my sobriety was going. They drove all the way down from Brooklyn for a five-minute conversation. Before they left, Paul Harris said, ‘James, I think you have a lot to tell, but you’re not telling anybody.’ ”

  After the FBI left this time, Jimmy asked Denise to join him out in the backyard so that he could more openly discuss everything. “I assumed my house was bugged and didn’t want to discuss anything inside,” Battista says. “I finally told her what was going on, which made her even more upset than she already was; she had every right to be. She just couldn’t believe what I had done.” Despite her growing disdain for Jimmy, Denise understood his refusal to work with the authorities. “I never considered cooperating for a second,” Battista says. “My wife never asked me to consider it, either, because she knew me. I am not a rat. I told Denise, ‘Look, I fucked up. Drugs are one thing, and I fucked up our marriage, but I am not going to fuck anyone else because of the mistakes I made.”

  At that point, Battista, who assumed he was under constant surveillance and that his phone was tapped, still had all of his computers and his sixteen cell phones. He immediately got rid of fifteen phones, saving only what he called the “Tommyto-Elvis” phone. All of the other phones had the contact information for all of his clients, and thus had to be destroyed and discarded. The all-knowing computers each met the same fate as the fifteen phones. Battista called Lucky’s lawyer friend Jack McMahon that night, who told Battista to come into his office the next day.

  Jack McMahon Jr. was a fiery and well-known Philadelphia defense attorney who had served as a prosecutor with the District Attorney’s Office. A trial lawyer who worked on several high-profile cases, McMahon was perhaps best known for representing alleged mob soldier Martin “Marty” Angelina in a much-publicized Philly-organized crime racketeering case in 2001.1 Battista knew none of this when he reached out to McMahon, and he certainly wasn’t aware of the attorney’s personal background, which was too ironic to be believed, given his prospective representation of a client targeted in a betting scandal involving the NBA.

  “My dad was drafted in 1952 by the Rochester Royals [who are now the Sacramento Kings] out of St. John’s, where he was an All-American guard,” McMahon says of his father, Jack McMahon Sr.2 He played two or three seasons with the Royals and got traded to the St. Louis Hawks, and he played for them for about five seasons. He was on the 1958 NBA championship team that beat Bill Russell and the Celtics. Right after retiring, he started coaching in the ABL [American Basketball League], where he coached the Kansas City Steers. He coached them for a year before the league went under, and then got hired as the head coach of the expansion Chicago Zephyrs, where he coached Don Nelson. He next got hired to coach the Cincinnati Royals in 1963, and he coached them for four years. In Cincinnati, he coached great players like Oscar Robertson, Jerry Lucas, and Wayne Embry.3 I was a ball boy for the Royals; I did the jackets, the coats, wiped up the sweat, all that stuff. Anybody that tells me that Oscar Robertson wasn’t the best, I tell them they’re full of shit. Oscar was just an unbelievable basketball player. The NBA expanded in 1967, and my dad was hired away from Cincinnati to coach the San Diego Rockets [who are now the Houston Rockets]. He coached them for two-and-a-half seasons before getting fired. He didn’t get along with the team’s superstar, Elvin Hayes, and as the old saying goes, ‘It’s easier to get rid of the coach . . .’

  “Next, he coached in the ABA [American Basketball Association] with the Pittsburgh Condors for two seasons. Then, in 1972, the year the Sixers were nine-and-seventy-three—that debacle of a year—Kevin Loughery became the coach when they fired Roy Rubin in the middle of the season. Kevin Loughery and my dad were very good friends; both were Brooklyn guys and both went to St. John’s. My dad became an assistant coach and became their director of player personnel, where he was essentially their chief scout around the country. When the Sixers won the NBA Championship in 1983, they had the families of the coaches on the floats in the parade in front of two million people. I was about thirty-one years old, and it was one of the most memorable moments of my life. My father left Philadelphia in 1986 to join his good friend Don Nelson, who had gotten the job as the Golden State Warriors coach. He coached there and was their director of player personnel for three seasons until he died of a heart attack in a Chicago hotel as they were doing a pre-draft camp for rookies in 1989.”4 Years later, when Don Nelson tied legendary Boston Celtics coach Red Auerbach with nine-hundred thirty-eight wins, Nelson called Auerbach and Jack McMahon Sr. his two mentors.

  When Jimmy Battista first met Jack McMahon, he was still in his ‘need-to-know’ mind-set, which may have been okay in other circumstances, but wasn’t suitable for a meeting with a criminal defense lawyer. “When I met with Jack,” Battista says, “he started by saying, ‘Okay, what’s going on?’ Before I had a chance to respond, he said, ‘Tell me the truth . If you lie to me, I can’t make rational decisions; the more that you tell me, the more I can help you.’ ” Unfortunately for McMahon, Battista’s initial replies were less than candid. “I gave him the same spiel I give every client when they come in for their first interview,” McMahons says. “ ‘You never lie to your lawyer. Your doctor and your lawyer are two people you never lie to because they can’t help you unless they know the facts.’ I told him, ‘Everything you say to me is confidential . . .’ and he started talking. He was talking in, like, cryptic sentences. He was really nervous, and paranoid, and kept looking out my window like there was someone out there. He kept giving me these cryptic answers and finally I said, ‘Look, man. This is just bullshit. This is wasting your time and it’s wasting my time, because you’re not even close to telling me the truth. You’re telling the doctor the pain is in the right leg and it’s in the left leg.’ That first meeting ended with me telling him to leave.” Having made no real progress in this initial attorney-client meeting, other efforts were needed before any decisions could be made before moving forward, but even these weren’t productive initially.

  “It was like we were doing a dance in those early days,” McMahon says, “and I kept telling him how frustrating and stupid it was. The conversations required me to figure out what he was saying, and I would tell him, ‘This isn’t a quiz game. I’m not here to try and solve your cryptic messages.’ Most clients come in and tell you one of two versions of what they did. Some guys will tell you the truth, straight out, and some guys will flat out lie to you. Jimmy was different. He didn’t tell me anything . He would give me a little bit of information, and I’d have to figure out what he was trying to say. Then he’d give a little more, and on it went. It was like he didn’t want to tell me things, and felt better about talking to me if I somehow came to my own conclusions.”

  During one of the first meetings Battista had with McMahon, the full story finally began to emerge. Battista started talking about his gambling career, about moving games for the world’s sharpest and most consequential bettors, and about being in the hole for millions of dollars. McMahon then pointedly asked, “What did the FBI agents ask you?” Battista explained that he was asked about inside information and a scandal in the NBA or in the NFL. McMahon, his curiosity piqued, followed up, “Why would they ask you that?” Battista, as was his standard, held back the whole story and simply told his new lawyer that he had a lot of handicappers who obtained and disseminated inside information. The back-and-forth continued, frustrating McMahon, who could sense Battista was holding something back. The lawyer said, “Listen, I want to help you, but I don’t need your case. Now, what’s your involvement? Who were your handicappers?” Battista replied that he had “a few guys on the inside” who gave him information, to which McMahon countered, “How ‘inside’ were they?” Battista, still holding back, said, “They were right there on t
he firing line.” McMahon couldn’t take Battista’s act a second more, and shouted, “‘JUST FUCKING TELL ME!’ The rattled Battista finally said, ‘One of my handicappers was an NBA referee,” causing McMahon to pause as he processed what he had just heard. “I was surprised,” McMahon says, “but I wasn’t shocked. I guess I have always felt that area was fertile for corruption in any sport. In any group of human beings, there are going to be some who succumb to temptation. I was a little upset it was the NBA because I had grown up with the league. I wish it had been another sport, but that didn’t affect anything I did.” Importantly, the dam had broken, and the working relationship between client Battista and attorney McMahon was healthy from that point forward. “He knew he could trust me,” McMahon says, “and everything went fine from there.”