DETROIT (FOX 2) – Detroit Pistons legend Chauncey Billups, the current head coach of the Portland Trail Blazers, has been arrested as part of a widespread FBI investigation on Thursday, Fox News Digital confirmed.
Billups, along with Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier were both arrested in an investigation tied to a probe into members of the La Cosa Nostra crime families. The FBI will hold a news conference about its probe at 10 a.m. ET.
What we know:
Rozier’s arrest was tied to NBA gambling and Billups’ arrest was tied to poker, Fox News Digital confirmed.
Rozier was arrested early Thursday morning as part of an FBI sports betting gambling probe, sources tell ESPN.Â
“This is an illegal gambling operation and sports rigging operation that spanned the course of years,” FBI director Kash Patel said. “The FBI led a coordinated takedown across 11 states to arrest over 30 individuals today responsible for this case, which is very much ongoing. Not only did we crack into the fraud that these perpetrators committed on the grand stage of the NBA, but we also entered and executed a system of justice against La Cosa Nostra to include the Bonanno, Gambino, Genovese and Lucchese crime families.”
The FBI director spoke first, saying that the crime went on for years and wasn’t in a few hundreds or thousands or even a million dollars.Â
“The fraud is mind-boggling,” Patel said. “We’re talking tens of millions of dollars of fraud and theft and robbery.”
Joseph Nocella Jr, U.S. Attorney, Eastern District of New York, said there were two different indictments and both involved fraud.
“The first indictment involves six defendants who are alleged to have participated in one of the most brazen sports corruption schemes since online sports betting became widely legalized in the United States. This scheme is an insider sports betting conspiracy that exploited confidential information about National Basketball Association athletes and teams,” Nocella said.
“The second indictment involves 31 defendants alleged to have participated in a nationwide scheme to rig illegal poker games. These defendants, which include former professional athletes, used high-tech cheating technology to steal millions of dollars from victims in underground poker games that were secretly fixed,” he said.
Billups is linked to the illegal poker games.
“Beginning as early as 2019. The defendants in this case orchestrated a scheme to use wireless cheating technology to run rigged poker games across the United States, including in the Hamptons, Las Vegas, Miami and Manhattan. The scheme targeted victims known as, quote, fish, who were often lured to participate in these rigged games by the chance to play alongside former professional athletes who were known as, quote, face cards,” he said. “The so-called face cards included the defendant, Chauncey Billups, who at the time of the scheme was a former NBA player and is currently the head coach of the Portland Trailblazers and also Damon Jones, a former NBA player and coach.”
Nocella said the victims at the game had no idea they were being taken for thousands of dollars.
“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,” Nocella said. “Once the game was underway, the defendants fleeced the victims out of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per game. The defendants used a variety of very sophisticated cheating technologies, some of which were provided by other defendants in exchange for a share of the profits from the scheme.”
How the rigged poker games worked
Nocella said they used a card shuffling machine that was altered to read the cards in the deck, predict who had the best hand, and then relay it to an off-site operator.
That person, Nocella said, would then send information back to another person at the table, known as the quarterback.
“The quarterback then signaled secretly the information he had received from others to others at the table, and together they used that information in order to,, win their games and to cheat the victims. The defendants used other cheating technologies, such as poker chip tray analyzers, which is a poker chip tray that secretly reads cards, using a hidden camera, special contact lenses, or eyeglasses that could read premarket cards and an X-ray table that could read cards face down on the table,” he said.
The crime didn’t stop with illegal games.
Nocella said the defendants also got involved in money laundering and robbery.
“The defendants laundered their proceeds, including through cash exchanges, the use of multiple shell companies, and through cryptocurrency transfers. As part of this scheme, some of the defendants and their coconspirators conspirators also committed acts of violence, including the gunpoint robbery of a person in order to obtain a rigged shuffling machine, and extortions that were perpetrated against victims in order to ensure that they repaid their gambling debts,” he said.
Billups and others arrested for the rigged games are charged with illegal gambling, money laundering, Hobbs Act, robbery and extortion.
Billups was on the sidelines for the Trail Blazers against the Minnesota Timberwolves on Wednesday while Rozier did not play on Wednesday night against the Orlando Magic.Â
Billups, a Hall of Famer and NBA champion with the Detroit Pistons, played 17 years in the league. He was a five-time All-Star.
FILE-Terry Rozier #2 of the Miami Heat dribbles the ball during the second half in a preseason game against the Memphis Grizzlies at Kaseya Center on October 17, 2025 in Miami, Florida. (Photo by Tomas Diniz Santos/Getty Images)
According to the Associated Press, the gambling case was brought by the same U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn, New York that previously prosecuted ex-NBA player Jontay Porter.Â
Porter, a former center for the Toronto Raptors, pleaded guilty to charges that he withdrew early from games, claiming illness or injury, so that those in the know could win big by betting on him to underperform expectations, the AP reported.Â
The Source: Information for this story was provided by FOX News, ESPN, LiveNOW from FOX, and the Associated Press.Â