"Untold: Flagrant Foul" Out Now: We Review the Documentary
Out this week, "Untold: Operation Flagrant Foul". If you even remotely dabble in gambling, you'll love this one. The “Untold” series is now in its second season on Netflix. "Untold" delves into the world of some of sports greatest scandals and eyebrow raisers. If you've ever watched the "Dark Side of the Ring" documentaries on ViceLand, you will love "Untold".
I first stumbled upon this documentary series with “Crime & Penalties”. Admitedly, I wasn't blown away by this particular documentary. Some of the subjects interviewed came off as if they were auditioning for something.
“Crime & Penalties” looked into the now defunct United Hockey League (UHL) ice hockey team the Danbury Trashers.
A man with mob ties, James Galante, gifts the team to his 17-year-old son, A. J., making him the president and general manager of the team. The father-and-son tandem assemble a group of outcasts that go onto develop a loyal fan base thanks in no small part to their penchant for violence.
More compelling, we get an inside look at the FBI preparing to move in on Galante. He and the team don't see it coming. We do. The Thrashers, it turns out, were used as a mob front and the FBI caught wind of this.
By the end of the team's second season, Galante was arrested on 72 criminal charges, including RICO violations.
I’m not so sure a film studio would accept this script, but the fact that it’s a real life story makes “Crime & Penalties” all the more tantalizing.
A Hollywood studio sure as hell would not touch the Manti Te’o story. Of the two "Untold" docs I previously watched, this one was off the charts good. Even when it’s over we’re still left wondering how this was even possible.
“The Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist” re-examines the Manti Te’o cat fishing scandal. Ronaiah 'Naya' Tuiasosopo, the one-time male quarterback behind the scheme, has since transitioned into a trans woman, apparently while the doc was being produced. “The Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist” also explores how both Naya and Manti’s lives have changed over the last decade. I couldn't help but wonder all the more how Manti Te could be this gullible or, as some believed, if maybe he was in on this all along. I loved that the documentarians brought us Naya's story. It was all so unbelievable but we know it happened.
Needless-to-say, I waited with bated breath for “Operation Flagrant Foul”, expecting it to be of the same high quality. “Operation Flagrant Foul” did not disappoint.
“Operation Flagrant Foul” is the true story of Tim Donaghy, the NBA referee accused of betting on games he officiated over a decade ago.
Donaghy speaks frankly about the gambling scandal that ruined his career. He’s joined in the documentary by his partners in crime.
They are even more frank in their assessment of what transpired.
“He fixed them like a motherfucker,” one associate, James "Baba" Battista, says on camera in reference to the game-fixing. “He was the greatest.
“There was nobody who could control the whistle like Timmy did.”
Battista offered that was the only positive thing he had to say about Donaghy.
Another associate, Tommy Martino, claims in the film that Tim once said he could influence any game by six points either way.
Martino and Donaghy were friends growing up. Battista was just an acquaintance.
“Tim was hilarious in high school,” Martino divulges. “He was the guy pulling the fire alarm.”
Tommy was the link between Battista and Donaghy.
From Battista we learn the various gambling terminology involving bet amounts. The onetime waiter will definitely click with a lot of long time Gambling911.com readers. He got into bookmaking courtesy of a high rolling customer at the restaurant he worked at. Battista learned he could make an extraordinary amount of money without having to break his back waiting tables.
“A nickel was $500, a dime is $1000, a stick is $100,000,” he tells us. “If you get into my world, you were dealing with balloons and that was $1,000,000.
“If you didn’t know what they were, you weren’t invited to the party.”
“Operation Flagrant Foul” introduces us to “the animals”, a group of bookies from the Philadelphia area.
“We were good,” a confident Battista says of these Philly bookmakers.
They were all about getting the right information about a particular game.
“I had a good personality to get information out of people on a one-to-one basis,” Battista said.
One interesting aspect of the film is Donaghy’s assertion that the NBA did not exactly have the cleanest hands.
He brings up a situation in which the league advised officials to start cracking down on spin moves. Donaghy did just that, but he called a foul on one Michael Jordan. The disgraced ref claims another official pulled him to the side and said “they want that call, just don’t call it on him (Michael Jordan)”.
“The way David Stern structured the game, we knew it was better to treat the star players better than others.”
Donaghy later observed those refs officiating the NBA Finals allowing the stars to get away with fouls. He learned quickly that, if he wanted to make the big bucks reffing Playoff games, he’d need to follow their lead.
Another disclosure: Other refs, while on the road, loved to gamble in casinos. That was against their contract. Not only were they prohibited from betting on any sports, they were not allowed to gamble in casinos.
He claims the refs would bet against each other, specifically who among them would call the first foul of the night.
“A lot of that stuff went on,” he stated.
Executive producers Chapman and Maclain Way spoke to Awful Announcing back in July in regard to the doc:
“The main challenge is just a very basic one; ‘What is the clarity to the audience?’ It’s a very hard thing to get across to an audience that there’s actually different [point of views] within a story. There’s just a technical difficulty with that; ‘Is the audience tracking this, can they make sense of this?’ We’ve found, going back to Wild Wild Country when we had very different POVs between different characters, it can add a lot of energy.”
“Most human beings have their own version of the truth. We feel like it puts the audience into action, into determining how they feel about the story and who they think is believable. And we’ve always found it very dynamic to have unreliable narrators at the center of our stories, and to not have any judgment on them and let them tell their story, and let audiences participate and see how they feel about it.”
"Untold: Operation Flagrant Foul" debuts at a perfect time, just as sports bettors prepare for the new football season. Watch it on Netflix now.
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