Chauncey Billups Played Key Role in Elaborate Poker Fraud, FBI Says

The FBI unsealed an indictment on Thursday into an alleged illegal poker ring that involved Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups and former NBA player Damon Jones.

The FBI arrested 31 people on Thursday morning involved in the alleged poker scheme, including members of Italian organized crime families, former NBA players, and game organizers. The agency also unveiled another indictment involving game fixing in the NBA. The FBI said several current and former players including Jones, Terry Rozier, and Jontay Porter were involved in the game fixing scheme, but Rozier and Porter are not named in the poker indictment.

Federal prosecutors allege that the organizers enticed unwitting bettors to play poker games that used technology to cheat the players out of millions of dollars. Some of the technology included shuffling machines that predicted which player had the best hand and alerted someone at the table through a text, x-ray technology that read cards face-down on the table, glasses or contact lenses that read pre-marked cards, and secret cameras in card trays.

The games took place in Manhattan, East Hampton, Miami, and Las Vegas. The indictment says New York’s Italian organized crime families, who already ran “non-rigged” games in the city, “provided support and protection for the games” and collected debts in exchange for a portion of the illegal earnings.

Since 2019, the scheme has taken at least $7.15 million from victims, according to the indictment. The FBI said the case is ongoing.

The Eastern District of New York released the 22-page indictment and 32-page detention letter, which included photos of the technology and screenshots of messages exchanged.

According to the indictment, the illegal activity has been going on since 2019. “In some instances,” the indictment says, Billups’s and Jones’s celebrity status was used to attract victims to play in the games. Known as “face cards,” they received some of the criminal earnings for participating in the operation, the indictment says.

The shuffling machines would read the cards to predict which player had the best hand and send that information to an operator, who messaged a “quarterback” or “driver” in the game room that could signal to the message players, according to the indictment. Other tactics included electronic trays that could read cards placed on the tables, card analyzers on decoy cell phones, and using cards with marks only visible through special contacts or sunglasses, the indictment reads.

The indictment says Billups participated in rigged games in Las Vegas in April 2019 that took at least $50,000 from victims.

“The one guy on the end acted like he wanted Chauncey to have his money!” reads one message included in the detention letter from the April 2019 game sent by organizer Robert Stroud. “He was star struck!” 

Another message sent by defendant Sophia Wei confirmed Billups and another player “already know all the signals.”

Billups also participated in an October 2020 game, after which he received a wire of $50,000, the detention letter says.

Billups was inducted into the Naismith Hall of Fame last year. In 2004, he won an NBA title and was named Finals MVP with Detroit, where his No. 1 jersey is retired. He has been head coach of the Trail Blazers since 2021, and will be replaced by interim Tiago Splitter. Before Portland, he was an assistant for one year with the Clippers. The Trail Blazers signed Billups to a two-year contract extension in April. (The exact amount was unknown, but he reportedly received a raise from his $4.7 million annual salary last season.) His 1997 sexual assault allegations, settled in a civil case in 2000, were a major point of contention upon his hiring in Portland.

“Terry Rozier and Chauncey Billups are being placed on immediate leave from their teams, and we will continue to cooperate with the relevant authorities,” the NBA said in a statement. “We take these allegations with the utmost seriousness, and the integrity of our game remains our top priority.”

The detention letter also includes a text Jones sent to Stroud asking for $10,000 in advance of a September 2023 game in East Hampton, New York. Stroud sent Jones $2,500 that day. Another text shows a defendant instructing Jones how to cheat and referring to other cheating players as “the Steph” and “the Bron” of the operation. “Lol man y’all call Djones in cause y’all know I know what I’m doing!! Let me hibachi like Gilbert Arenas,” Jones responded. Arenas, another former player, was arrested this summer, charged with running his own illegal poker operation in California.

Jones played for 10 different NBA teams over his career and had a three-year stint as an assistant coach with the Cavaliers, where he won an NBA title in 2016. Jones is also named in the game-fixing indictment, which says he would share information about Lakers player injuries before the information became public so that co-conspirators could place bets and pay him a portion of the winnings. This happened in the 2022–23 and 2023–24 seasons, the indictment says; Jones was an unofficial Lakers coach during the first of those seasons, and claimed to get information from a trainer during the other one, according to the document. The descriptions of the unnamed players match the identities of LeBron James and Anthony Davis.

While Billups is not named in the game fixing case, he matches a description provided to “Co-Conspirator 8,” an NBA coach since 2021 who played in the league from 1997 to 2014 and lived in Oregon. That indictment says Co-Conspirator 8 told Eric Earnest, who is a defendant in both cases, in March 2023 that the Blazers would be tanking and benching their best players in a game that night, leading defendants to place successful bets for Portland to lose.

Billups and Jones are both charged with counts of wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy for the poker case. Jones faces the same two charges in the game fixing case.

The detention letter says members of the poker scheme “committed violent acts, including assault, extortions, and robbery,” as well as making threats and intimidation, to further the operations and collect debts from victims. The defendants also laundered the money to cover up the scheme, including through cryptocurrency, according to the indictment.

Billups’s name has previously been linked to questionable poker operations. Professional poker player Matthew Berkey had mentioned a rigged game two years ago on his Only Friends podcast that happened “2019-ish” in Las Vegas that he said was “all built around Chauncey Billups.”

“It was basically confirmed amongst all of the pros that the game was cheated, but there was just no recourse,” Berkey said. (Berkey did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.)
Berkey and his cohost also mentioned Paul Pierce, another former NBA player who is an avid poker player, which is part of why he lost his job at ESPN. “It’s not like Chauncey and Pierce don’t know each other,” Berkey said. “I feel like it’s probably the same crowd overlapping there, but maybe not.” A representative for Pierce did not immediately respond to a request for comment.