Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups is one of 31 defendants accused of helping mobsters swindle millions of dollars from unsuspecting poker players during a series of rigged games.
All this was outlined in a federal indictment that dropped Thursday, Oct. 23, leading to the arrest of Billups and others. According to the indictment, defendants allegedly used wireless cheating technology to run rigged poker games in places including the Hamptons, Miami, Las Vegas and Manhattan.
Billups, who was not the coach of the Trail Blazers at the time of his alleged involvement but merely a former NBA player, was one of the draws that helped lure victims to the illegal poker games.
‘What the victims, the fish, didn’t know, is that everybody else at the poker game, from the dealer to the players — including the face cards — were in on the scam,’ U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Joseph Nocella Jr. said. ‘Once the game was underway, the defendants fleeced the victims out of tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars per game.’
But exactly how much money did these poker games allegedly defraud from victims?
According to the federal indictment, the alleged conspiracy ’caused losses to the Victims of at least $7,150,000,’ though the amount that Billups and other alleged participants earned from the scheme was not listed in the document.
The indictment, however, does cite specific examples to illustrate the scope of the operation.
In one case, during an alleged rigged poker game around April 2019 in Las Vegas, the indictment alleges that a rigged shuffling machine was used to defraud victims of at least $50,000. Billups was listed among the alleged participants at that game.
The indictment lists other illegal poker games around June and July 2023 in Manhattan that allegedly defrauded one specific unnamed victim of around $1.8 million. Billups was not implicated in this example, which also used a rigged shuffling machine to allegedly dupe the victims.
Another alleged rigged poker game took place around June 2023 in East Hampton, New York, that defrauded a pair of unnamed victims of $46,500 and $105,000, respectively. Billups was also not listed in that alleged game, nor was he listed in a final example that took place in Miami in September 2024 that defrauded another unnamed victim of $60,000.
The indictment doesn’t list the full accounting of all the money alleged to have been earned from the operation.
Billups was arraigned Oct. 23 on charges of wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy at the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse in Portland, Oregon.
Charges in this scheme include wire fraud conspiracy, illegal gambling, money laundering, robbery, and extortion. This case is unrelated to the insider sports-betting conspiracy that led to the arrest of Miami Heat player Terry Rozier.