The Associated Press says the Arizona State point shaving scandal of the mids started as one teammate helping out another. Players don't even have to play to do what gamblers want. The scrutiny affixed to line movements makes it difficult to call in the fix every night.
Looking back at the line movements prior to San Diego's game against UC-Riverside, gambling website Covers observes several unusual patterns. Not only was there "rapid line movement at each of the 11 offshore sportsbooks recorded," but "by tipoff, Riverside was favored by 1-point at most books," after starting out as two-point underdogs.
Mobster Henry Hill, later the subject of Goodfellas , orchestrated point shaving at Boston College during the basketball season. He explained the dynamic between fixer and fixee to Sports Illustrated. As a complimentary service, I bet money for the players when they so requested. In the locker room after the loss, coach Grier asked his best shooter why he didn't put up an open shot.
As Johnson would later tell Brown, he looked at his coach and thought: That's a "G" right there. That's why I ain't get no shot up. That shot would never have gotten me the "G. But according to a study published in the peer-reviewed International Journal of Sport Finance last August, there's reason to suspect that point-shaving is far from an isolated occurrence.
The study's authors, George Diemer and Michael Leeds, theorized that if point-shaving were happening on a large scale, they'd most likely find signs of it in regular-season games with double-digit lines. Imagine you're a player who's willing to shave points. If your team is favored by 11 points, you might feel confident that you can cost your team the cover without blowing the outright victory -- instead of winning by 12 or 13, you make it so your team wins by merely seven or eight.
What's the harm in that? But if your team is favored by only two or three points, you'll likely be less willing to fix that game, since the risk is much higher that you will cost your team the outright win. And you certainly wouldn't dare fix an NCAA tournament game, no matter how much you're favored, given all the extra eyes watching. To see whether their theory was correct, the two authors looked at point spreads over a year period between and -- 35, games in all.
As they expected, there was nothing fishy in games with smaller spreads. In contests featuring a three-point spread, for example, the most common result was that the favorite won by three. The next most common result was the favorite winning by four or two, then by five or one, and so on -- a "normal distribution" of outcomes.
But when the authors looked at regular-season games involving 11? There was a significant spike in the number of times the favorites won by seven, eight or nine points -- they won but failed to cover. Tellingly, and as the authors had predicted, this anomaly was not seen in postseason games with 11? With all the extra attention in March, the outcomes followed the same distribution pattern as the rest.
This wasn't the first study to suggest a game within the game for bettors. In economist Justin Wolfers estimated that point-shaving occurred in about 5 percent of games with large spreads, or as many as 30 games a year -- roughly the number Diemer and Leeds came up with.
Of course, skeptics point out that there are plenty of reasons a heavily favored team might fail to cover: Stars get removed in lopsided games, backups struggle, the losers start playing for pride. So there is some evidence for the hypothesis that there was a murder. But there's other evidence that could explain the death too, such as the woman had a heart condition. And since people with that condition die of natural causes a thousand times more often than they get murdered, I'm going with natural causes.
It turns out that in regular-season games with 11? That suggests that players on big underdogs are fixing games too after all, who cares if you lose by 11 or In fact, only a handful of cases have been exposed over the years.
More than a decade later, several football and basketball players from the University of Toledo admitted selling themselves to a pair of Detroit gamblers who fixed regular- and postseason games. A former point guard for Auburn, Varez Ward, is under indictment on charges that he threw a January game against Arkansas.
So if the crime is almost imperceptible, how do you prove it happened? The answer is, you get lucky, which is exactly what occurred when two FBI agents in San Diego began trailing a drug dealer suspected of moving large amounts of pot across state lines. THE FBI's San Diego headquarters lie in a heavily gated office building on the outskirts of the city, where full-time agents police everything from Mexican drug cartels to corruption in Southern California's defense industry.
In Nicholas Cheviron was one of the office's newer agents. He'd come from Bloomington, Ill. Late that year, the duo got a file dropped on their desk about a routine traffic checkpoint in which a suspect was stopped in a Camry that reeked of weed. The U. The suspect was Steve Goria, and his troubles explaining where the cash came from led the Feds to seize the money and landed his file with Cheviron and Houska.
Seeing him as a possible conduit to a larger drug-trafficking outfit, the agents put his photo on their corkboard. Every few weeks, they followed him as he made weekly visits to his mother's house, his local church and a social club where he played poker. One thing they learned quickly was that Goria loved to brag. He talked about how much money he was making peddling dope, his sideline as a bookie and all the girlfriends he had. But what really caught the agents' attention was when an informant told them that Goria was boasting about having a USD player on his payroll.
They were already looking at a conspiracy charge involving drug-running and bookmaking. Now they had a new element to throw in: sports bribery. They also had a new name to give their operation: Hookshot. Bismarck in the winter is about as far away from San Diego as you can get, and after being selected by the Dakota Wizards in the second round of the NBA's developmental draft, Johnson had struggled to adjust to his new surroundings.
In fact, he was almost relieved when his left knee started swelling and the Wizards sent him back to Houston for several weeks to rest it. While Johnson was trying to begin the next chapter in his life, the FBI agents were closing in on his previous one.
First, they subpoenaed Goria's phone records and found he'd been making hundreds of calls to Brown. Then, in December , after they got permission from a federal judge to begin wiretapping phones, they asked an informant who knew Goria to call him and discuss Brown.
But recently, he said, their scheme seemed to have stalled. The problem wasn't Goria's willingness to keep paying Brown. The problem was that he didn't think Brown had anyone on the current squad who was as malleable as Johnson had been. If Goria was frustrated, the agents were even more so. They didn't want to rely just on wiretaps; they wanted to catch their suspects committing a crime. So they decided to turn up the heat by having the informant -- a cocaine dealer who was looking for help with his own case -- encourage Goria to rekindle his scheme.
The informant even offered to kick in several thousand bucks if Goria could find a USD player willing to listen to an offer about shaving points. Goria relayed the offer to Brown, and on Jan. Johnson was watching TV in his Bismarck apartment when Brown phoned to let him in on the deal. Johnson was astonished.
But weeks dragged on with no progress. With only two games left in the season, the informant gave Brown one last pitch. As Brown soon explained to Johnson on the phone: "I was just chilling and these n -- s just came over in a Bentley, like talkin' big, big s S -- , these n -- s was talking. After the call, he reached out to a Toreros sophomore he'd remained friendly with, a 6'5" forward named Ken Rancifer. A little while later, Johnson called Brown back.
He hit me, he just text me. Cheviron and Houska looked at each other, wide-eyed. Oh, hell yeah. Brown had arrived with Johnson's recruit, Rancifer, and they'd gone inside to meet Goria and his partners. But the vibe was strange; Rancifer was drenched in sweat. According to the wiretaps, the player thought he was getting money to listen to an offer, not get threatened by a wiseguy. Perhaps the senior point guard would miss a free throw now and then or draw a technical foul.
The co-conspirators routinely got together to discuss the predictions of oddsmakers and to pick which games to fix. They would then make their bets—often on the other team USD was usually favored to win —which would enhance their winnings even more. The amount of money that Johnson got paid is one of the reasons that I believe this was not an isolated incident.
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