A top crime journalist has claimed that elite sports stars are ‘easy prey’ for mobsters and illegal match fixing syndicates, who see them as individuals with ‘lots of money and not much sense’ and easy to intimidate.
Last week, the NBA was rocked when Miami Heat point guard Terry Rozier and Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups were among dozens of people arrested as part of an extensive FBI investigation into illegal sports betting and mafia-linked poker games. The case is alleged to involve five major crime families in New York, and raises huge questions on how to regulate gambling in sport worldwide.
While the NBA is the latest sports franchise to be engulfed in a betting scandal, The Athletic’s Mike Vorkunov believes that baseball is just as if not more suspectable to spot fixing than basketball due to the potential an individual has to impact the outcome of a game. “It’s susceptible in the way that one person can affect a game more easily in basketball than, say, football,” he says, speaking on The Sports Agents podcast. “I think maybe baseball is pretty susceptible too. I don’t know if you guys saw, but this summer, there was a gambling scandal in Major League Baseball.”
When asked why elite sports stars get involved in match and spot fixing, despite being on lucrative contracts, LBC’s crime correspondent and co-host of The Crime Agents podcast Andy Hughes suggests that players are seen as ‘easy prey’ by mobsters, and are intimidated into being involved. “If you’re involved in organised crime, their main tactic is intimidation and exploitation. They will see highly paid sports stars who, frankly, don’t know a lot about the real world, as easy prey,” he says. “This is a common tactic that we see time and time again. These organised, intimidating criminals going after, as they see, vulnerable people with lots of money and maybe not much sense.”
As Andy adds, from conversations he has had with the police in the UK, there is an overriding feeling that betting systems are set up to be exploited due to the number of niche bets they have on offer. “I spoke to a detective about this, and he says the way the betting system is certainly set up in this country, and how niche you can make these bets, it’s actually designed to be exploited,” he says. “It’s designed to actually be corrupt. Because why else would you bet on someone who’s going to take a corner in the eighth minute of a game or something like that, other than you know more than you should?”
As The Sports Agents co-host Mark Chapman interjects, he was baffled earlier this by how niche the betting market in the UK can be, sharing his surprise at seeing bets being placed against his name for the next Match Of The Day host! “But weirdly, Gabby, I mean, without bringing it back to us, which I know we like to do, there was a market for Match of the Day presenters,” he says. “And you know, I mean, I didn’t talk to anybody!”
