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The consequences of gambling - and potentially fixing - games that athletes are actually playing in could prove more serious than simply being banned from the sports for life.
That's the case with former Toronto Raptors player Jontay Porter. He's now facing a federal felony charge over allegations that he and four other men plotted to cash in on tips from a player about his plans to exit two games early.
Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn filed what's known as a criminal information sheet Tuesday. The document doesn't specify a court date or the charge or charges.
Porter's lawyer, Jeff Jensen, said last month that Porter had been "in over his head due to a gambling addiction" but was getting treatment and cooperating with law enforcement.
Timothy McCormack, Mahmud Mollah, Long Phi Pham and Ammar Awawdeh are listed as defendants in a federal wire fraud tied to the case.
An NBA investigation found in April that Porter tipped off bettors about his health and then claimed illness to exit at least one game and make some wagers succeed. Porter also gambled on NBA games in which he didn’t play, once betting against his own team, the league said.
Prosecutors say McCormack, Mollah, Pham and Awawdeh took part in a scheme to get “Player 1” to take himself off the court so that they could win bets against his performance.
And win they did, with Mollah's bets on a March 20 game netting over $1 million, according to the complaint. It said Pham, the player and the unnamed defendant were each supposed to get about a quarter of those winnings, and McCormack a 4% cut, before a betting company got suspicious and blocked Mollah from collecting most of the money.
McCormack also cleared more than $69,000 on bets on that game and another one Jan. 26, the complaint said.
According to the complaint, the player owed "significant gambling debts" to Awawdeh, who encouraged the athlete to settle them with a "special": intentionally exiting games so that bettors in the know could successfully wager on him falling short of what sportsbooks figured he'd do.
"If I don't do a special with your terms. Then it's up," the player responded in an encrypted message early this year, according to the complaint. "And u hate me and if I don't get u 8k by Friday you're coming to Toronto to beat me up."
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