If you think the Celtics are the side that's likely to cover, then you go to market as early in the trading session as possible and put some money on Philly. In the car at the gas station, according to Gaming the Game, Donaghy had said: Bet the Celtics. It was only later, in 2007, after Donaghy had been exposed, that Donaghy's letter-of-the-law foul-calling acquired a darker hue. ON A NIGHT in early December 2006, Tommy Martino received an urgent phone call from Battista. "If it wasn't basketball season, he had a lot of time on his hands," says one of Donaghy's friends. Battista had said to the ref. Its absurd. Battista, after discovering this, had been following those bets for the better part of the past four years. FAQ: How will legal gambling change the NBA and the way we watch it? But she would keep finding such rolls in his pockets as the years went on. AND THEN THERE was a former friend of Donaghy's named Aron Kulle, who recalled the time Donaghy came to his office in Sarasota in a state of high anxiety. The NBA did too. Any game that he reffed we had a wager on.". Once we completed all of that, what we uncovered was that Donaghy's foul calls favored the team that received the heavier betting 70 percent of the time. According to Battista, though, it was Donaghy who reached out, asking for a meeting. Strictly speaking, movers are neither gamblers nor bookmakers. The number of games in which Tim Donaghy favored the team that attracted fewer betting dollars? Things may have been different. Another moneymaker -- according to people with knowledge of the events -- was a man named Spiros Athanas. Spiros "The Greek" Athanas Based on information from Tommy Martino, among others, there were reasons to suspect Donaghy had money on the vast majority of his games during the fateful 2006-07 season, from the very beginning until as late as April 11 -- 65 games in all. (Pedowitz, who has retired from his firm, did not respond to requests for comment. In 2008, former NBA referee Tim Donaghy was sentenced to 15 months in prison. A play that had to be called one way and that [Donaghy] called the other way. Larry Pedowitz We began by obtaining the trading histories for those games and through those determined which team was the more heavily bet upon. Who is Jimmy Battista? Where Is Tim Donaghy's Partner Now? Only a fool, Dr. Sean Patrick Griffin wrote, would have ignored Battistas ridiculously obvious wagering success.. " And still it went on Donaghy in Dallas on Jan. 30 calling one foul against the home team and 12 against Seattle, including six straight against the Sonics when the margin was 13 or fewer. It got out to Battista that I'm giving games to Jack! For 11 years, the official plotline has been that Donaghy was a rogue, gambling-addicted ref who made some bets on his own games -- and nothing more. The one thing we do know for sure, though, is he has a family and children, so he might just be focusing on caring for and spending quality time with them these days. And what more did you want? Scala recalls that he and Donaghy went around and around on the issue. "If you looked at the stats," said one gambler in The Office at the time, "you could see he was calling more fouls on the team he bet against and less fouls on the team he bet on. According to the league, the studies were based on "the entirety of the period during which Donaghy had admitted to gambling on games," including 194 games refereed by Donaghy himself, and entailed examinations of "officiating accuracy," "lopsided [foul] calling and the magnitude of lopsidedness," the timing of his calls during games, foul-call "streaks" and call volumes, along with an analysis of "all associated betting lines and movements. Ideally, Donaghy should make his pick as early as possible, preferably the night before his games, or at least the morning of. According to multiple sources, Battista first began moving bets for Athanas in 2005. -- wins and wins and wins and wins, his picks almost 100 percent wins. It would have been great for me, great for sales, just for selfish reasons, Griffin said. This scandal involved two childhood friends, Jimmy Battista, the gambler, and Tommy Martino, the go-between, who carried the money and information between Donaghy and Battista. The informant didn't know any names, and the people with the ref in their pocket did not appear to be made members of the Gambino crime family. Malloy, Crawford and Callahan all attended Delaware County's Cardinal O'Hara High School, Donaghy's alma mater -- a cradle within a cradle. Battista would cut a deal, pleading guilty in April 2008 only to the charge of transmission of gambling information. Sure enough, there he was. In total, according to a person with knowledge of their operation, he hoped to get down about $1 million of his investors' money in each of Donaghy's games. You don't want anyone "from New York" coming to your house, Battista told him. And so their syndicate came to be known by some as the Animals. And indeed, the chart for the Boston-Philly game on Dec. 13, 2006, shows the price for Boston spiking and then shrinking back. It was either sink or swim together for all of us. Now he feared the scheme had become too obvious. A player who's on the take can shave points, purposely missing baskets, say, in an effort to lower the score for his side. After learning about the suspicious circumstances surrounding the leak of the original Donaghy story and Jimmy Battista's plea deal, the crew investigates the most controversial game in . A decade later, in the break room of the hair salon he worked in, Martino told me how it had gone: Martino had already known that their mutual buddy Tim Donaghy had been betting on his own NBA games with Concannon, and winning those bets. We found the referee.'" All those gray-area decisions you have to make, Tim? "His father is an outstanding man," Rush, now retired, says today. He documented a 78% Donaghy win rate and paying him $201,000 for his tips, just a cog in Battistas tentacles, which reached Asia, Europe and Vegas. At the club he developed a circle of golfing pals. Dallas making both free throws, increasing its lead to eight. Iguodala heading to the bench; Boston covering the spread Donaghy in Seattle, the Sonics hosting the Mavericks, calling 11 straight fouls against Seattle as well as the last foul of the night, with 23 seconds to go. Based in an anonymous office building in Kew Gardens, Queens, Scala and his agents had spent years assembling a network of informants inside the gang. Or, actually, it was the moral of this story. He was [expletive] shrewd and believed everyone owed him the world.. The Celtics were favored by 1.5 points. By June 15, Donaghy was sitting inside the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York in downtown Brooklyn, naming names and making a statement. Just money, just business. Battista told Griffin. ", In the early 2000s, Rush went on to explain, the NBA undertook a wholesale revision of its refereeing guidelines, changes that would naturally lead to the entire NBA referee corps calling a greater volume of fouls, at least initially. In 2003 in Curaao, when the Animals had made their original deduction and followed the Donaghy-Concannon bets, Tiger had been the leader of the Animals' betting office. "We all had expectations that Tim was going to be really, really good. Tim Donaghy was unwittingly placing himself in harms way, Griffin wrote. Each of the city's famous Five Families -- Genovese, Lucchese, Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino -- has a dedicated FBI unit investigating it full time, and Scala was the boss of the one focused on the Gambinos. In 2015, Mastronardo had a stroke and died in prison. Same with the season after that and the season after that. Battista and Donaghy were never to speak directly. For that reason, he had a lot of cash on hand. They were an organized crime squad, dealing with murder and mayhem. Had he heard about Donaghy's gambling "issues" -- about what he had done? Donaghy had Martino arrange the Marriott rendezvous. Thats because this Netflix original documentary features first-hand accounts to elucidate precisely how and why once-renowned NBA referee Timothy Tim Donaghy staked on his own games. Furthermore, exceedingly large price jumps or plunges, or even the timing of certain price moves, could signal the trading strategies of a gambling syndicate. Gaming the Game: Baba, Elvis, and the NBA Betting Scandal Donaghy said he couldn't do that, Vercher recalled in a deposition. Even if it made them strange bedfellows, then, Donaghy's denials of match-fixing guilt were, in the end, a gift. "Maybe the company never sat at a table together," he says. Tim Donaghy Netflix docufilm returns disgraced ex-NBA ref to spotlight Print length 320 pages Language English Publisher UNKNO There's also Scala, who told me he heard from his informants that underground gamblers "could have been making over a hundred million dollars" on Donaghy's games. Both times, however, Donaghy didnt show. Rush, as director of refs, took notice but didn't think much of it at the time. Donaghy, Griffin said, distracts and diverts.