BREAKING: CHAUNCEY BILLUPS ARRESTED BY FBI FOR ILLEGAL GAMBLING (18 Viewers)

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If allegations prove true, we are all victims of Chauncey Billups’ fraud | Bill Oram​


Mr. Big Shot sat in a cell in Portland’s federal courthouse Thursday morning.

Chauncey Billups was arrested before dawn as part of a coordinated FBI operation that also nabbed the likes of Spanish G and Albanian Bruce, Flappy, Pookie, Black Tony, Juice and The Wrestler, a whole host of nefarious characters with alleged Mafia ties.

Are you kidding?

How utterly surreal.

How utterly... stupid.

The bombshell of Trail Blazers’ head coach Chauncey Billups arrest amid a broader gambling probe embarrasses the NBA, certainly. It raises serious questions about the validity of the games we watch, love and, yes, wager on.

But most urgently in Portland?

It makes you wonder how the Trail Blazers ever got so far down the road with a coach who arrived in Portland with the baggage of a decades-old rape allegation and now leaves in handcuffs.

What had to go wrong to allow the franchise to put so much faith in a man who, if the allegations against him are proven true, would act so malevolently? Who would be so flagrantly reckless with his own reputation and jeopardize his franchise’s integrity?

Over a nearly three-decade association with professional basketball, including winning Most Valuable Player in the 2004 NBA Finals, Billups has built his career on being the ultimate winner. A true, voracious competitor.

What he is accused of would shatter that hard-earned reputation.

He is not a winner. No, no.

If the indictment is to be believed, he is a cheat. He is a $100 million man with the world at his fingertips and, apparently, a card up his sleeve. That is how he will be remembered.

An addiction to winning — at any cost, even to one’s own credibility — is not the same as being driven by it.

True competitors do not cheat. They can’t. The possibility of losing is itself the thrill.

What the FBI alleges is that Billups participated in rigged poker games on at least two occasions, in April 2019 and October 2020, fully complicit in the orchestration of the conspiracy. Taking advantage of gamblers who were drawn in by the opportunity play with a celebrity.

According to the indictment, at various stages the con involved electronic poker chip trays that could secretly read cards placed on the table and playing cards that had markers that could only be read by players wearing special contact lenses or sunglasses. A player in on the scheme, the “quarterback,” would signal to others at the table with simple hand signals who had the best cards.

Billups was what the conspirators allegedly referred to as a “face card.” A celebrity employed to attract gamblers.

The games Billups is accused of helping fix in Las Vegas relied on rigged shuffling machines.

Did he know the lengths of the conspiracy with which he had allegedly become involved? Did he know that the games he played in were part of a vast scheme that tied back to the Bonanno, Gambino and Genovese crime families?

There is no way to know at this stage, of course, but I am inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

I’m willing to believe he was commissioned for one-offs. But even if he was in it for a cheap thrill or a cheap buck, he was willing to gamble away his legacy and swindle people who were awed by it.

In the last three years, I’ve gotten to know Billups through our respective jobs, as much as we can ever know the athletes and stars we cover. I’ve liked him. He was warm and engaging and it was easy to understand why players respond to him. He has also grown into his role as head coach.

None of that matters if he did what he is accused of. In that case, he has perpetrated a fraud on all of us. On Blazers’ chair Jody Allen and general manager Joe Cronin, on the Trail Blazers’ players and their fans.

I can’t convict Chauncey. That’s not how due process works. But I can condemn him for what appears to be profoundly poor judgment and an incredible betrayal of his position in this city.

The official charges in this case are money laundering and wire fraud. He was among more than 30 people indicted on Thursday as part of a two-prong multi-agency gambling probe that spanned both coasts.

The separate investigations identified both the rigged illegal poker games as well as a sports-betting scheme involving insider information that FBI Director Kash Patel called “the insider trading saga for the NBA.”

It’s not lost on me what a theatrical circus the Justice Department made of their announcement, utilizing several groan-inducing puns to describe the sting, including “Operation Nothing But Bet.”

Billups was a relatively small fish in this grand scheme and yet the FBI used his household name to headline their announcement and garner acclaim.

I found that mildly distasteful, but Billups is at fault for allegedly putting himself in this position.

He is not identified in the sports-betting indictment, which named Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier and ex-NBA player Damon Jones among the defendants.

However, the indictment refers to a “Co-Conspirator 8,” who lived in Oregon was an “NBA player from approximately 1997 through 2014 and an NBA coach since at least 2021.”

Yeah.

Billups was drafted third overall by the Boston Celtics in 1997. His eight-team career spanned 17 seasons and he retired in 2014 as a member of the Detroit Pistons. The Los Angeles Clippers hired him as an assistant coach in 2021, the year before he joined the Blazers.

Co-Conspirator 8 was alleged to have provided information about the Blazers plans to tank against the Chicago Bulls on March 24, 2023, leading to named defendants wagering more than $100,000 on the Blazers to lose.

And if we are to believe that Co-Conspirator 8 is Billups, and if the allegations against Co-Conspirator 8 are indeed true, then it does not matter that his actions did not meet the standard for a federal indictment. The NBA operates by a different standard.

Every NBA player, coach and employee is reminded daily about the rules involving betting, fixing and tipping. Found to have violated that policy, Billups — so universally loved by those in the game that he easily could have been hired as a coach, executive or broadcaster — could be banned from the game for life.

Was it worth it?

Last September, Billups slipped into an orange blazer in Springfield, Massachusetts, the universal symbol of reaching basketball’s pinnacle: The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

On Thursday morning, he was placed in handcuffs.

He will have his day in court.

But his days on an NBA court are almost certainly over.

All so he could allegedly sell out his team and sell off parts of himself.

How utterly sad.
https://www.oregonlive.com/staff/billoram/
Bill Oram

https://www.oregonlive.com/sports/2025/10/if-allegations-prove-true-we-are-all-victims-of-chauncey-billups-fraud-bill-oram.html
 
Denny Crane said:
People go to Vegas and end up betting and losing their cars and homes. It’s that kind of disease.

I lived in Vegas for 8 years. I would gamble $200 when we had guests visit. I also bet $10 on one hand of blackjack after brunch to see if I could get my brunch for free.

You don’t last long there if you gamble.
Click to expand...
I have a bunch of fun in Vegas and yes that includes gambling. I play craps and cards. Then I leave and go home.
 
Denny Crane said:
People go to Vegas and end up betting and losing their cars and homes. It’s that kind of disease.

I lived in Vegas for 8 years. I would gamble $200 when we had guests visit. I also bet $10 on one hand of blackjack after brunch to see if I could get my brunch for free.

You don’t last long there if you gamble.
Click to expand...
The first time I gambled, I won $5 at blackjack. The last time I gambled was the next hand when I lost $10. It felt so exceptionally bad I never gambled again. Apparently among my circle of friends I’m the weird one. I can’t stand it.
 

Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups faces fraud, money laundering charges in court​


Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups made his first appearance in federal court Thursday afternoon on a two-count indictment that charges him with participating in a nationwide scheme to rig poker games.

In a packed U.S. District Courtroom in downtown Portland, Billups, wearing a brown sweatshirt, gray sports pants and sneakers, sat between two defense attorneys with a blue folder of the criminal indictment on the desk in front of him.

Attorney Chris Heywood spoke on his behalf and arranged for Billups’ release.

Billups answered, “Yes,” when U.S. Magistrate Judge Jolie A. Russo asked if he understood his right to remain silent.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Barrows said he supported Billups’ release with certain conditions.

Heywood turned over Billups’ passport to the government. Billups is also required to prepare to secure a substantial bond with the federal court in the Eastern District of New York. His travel is restricted to Oregon and Colorado, and he’s due to appear on Nov. 24 at the federal courthouse in Brooklyn, N.Y.

He’s also prohibited from any gambling-related activity and any contact with his co-defendants.

“The conditions are standard and common in allegations like this,” Heywood told The Oregonian/OregonLive after the hearing. “Folks shouldn’t draw any conclusions from this.”

Billups stood up and scanned the public gallery of the courtroom before he was led out of the courtroom by deputy U.S. Marshals following the seven-minute hearing.

Billups is one of 31 people arrested across 11 states, accused of participating in a high-tech gambling scheme using wireless technology to cheat on mostly Texas Hold’em games played in Miami, Las Vegas, the Hamptons and New York.

Billups, 49, was arrested about 5 a.m. Thursday at his home in Lake Oswego. FBI agents first took him to their Portland office and then brought him to the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse, where he was held until his 1:30 p.m. court appearance.

Billups, who was placed on immediate leave from his Blazers head coaching job, was among the former professional athletes recruited to participate in the games as “face cards” to lure unsuspecting players to get cheated, according to federal prosecutors in New York.

His indictment followed a four-year long FBI investigation dubbed “Operation Royal Flush.”

Prosecutors said members and associates of the Bonanno, Gambino and Genovese organized crime families of La Cosa Nostra are accused of backing games in the New York area and taking cuts of the criminal proceeds from those games.

Organizers used secret hand signals, X-rays, special glasses and rigged card shuffling machines to identify cards even when they were face down, causing some victims to lose tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time, prosecutors alleged.

In April 2019, Billups, along with four others, is accused of organizing and participating in poker games in Las Vegas using a rigged shuffling machine provided by co-defendant Robert Stroud and defrauding players of at least $50,000, prosecutors alleged in a detention memo.

Straud is accused of recruiting former professional athletes such as Billups and Damon Jones, a former Cleveland Cavaliers assistant coach and player, to lure wealthy players to the games and then paying them a portion of the proceeds, the memo alleged.

After another card game in late October 2020, bank records showed that Stroud, through his company Lil Robbie Productions, LLC, wired $50,000 to co-defendant Sophia Wei, who in turn wired that amount to Billups, the prosecutors’ memo stated. Wei is a Queens resident nicknamed “Pookie,” according to the memo.

Text messages obtained by federal agents showed Stroud and Wei discussing Billups’ participation during the card games and the need to lose on occasion to avoid any suspicion of cheating, according to the memo.

“The one guy on the end acted like he wanted Chauncey to have his money! He was star struck!” read one text from Stroud, according to the memo.

Wei texted about her concern that bettor Eric Earnest, nicknamed “Spook,” and Billups had won too many improbable hands -- “hit 2 gutshot on the river against the same guy” - which would arouse suspicion, the prosecutors’ memo said.

Wei then suggested the organizers put in another member of the team - at the table so Billups and Earnest could lose, according to the memo.

A text message from Wei read: “So I was thinking maybe instead of u playing we let one of the middle eastern guys play … and whenever he got the winning hand Chauncey and/spook lose to him and Mitch,” according to the memo.

The shuffling machines were secretly altered to use concealed technology to read the cards in the deck, predict which player at a table had the best poker hand and relay that information to an off-site operator, according to the memo.

That off-site person would then relay the information by cellphone back to someone playing at the table, referred to as the “quarterback,” or “driver” of the conspiracy, prosecutors said.

The quarterback would use prearranged secret signals – such as touching certain chips or other items on a table -- to communicate with accomplice players, and the “cheating team” would use the information to win games, the memo stated.

Other times, the alleged conspirators used a poker chip tray analyzer that secretly read cards using hidden cameras, an X-Ray table that could read cards face down and special contact lenses or eyeglasses that could read pre-marked cards, prosecutors alleged.

Billups was inducted into the Hall of Fame as a player in 2024 following a 17-year career in which he was a five-time All-Star and the 2004 NBA Finals MVP.

The prosecution memo had urged a judge to impose “substantial bail conditions” on Billups and others, noting his “substantial” financial resources as an NBA player from 1997 to 2013, his current multi-year contract as a Blazers coach and his lifetime career earnings of over $100 million. That may occur once he appears in federal court in Brooklyn.

In a second case, a federal indictment alleging illegal sports betting does not directly name Billups but suggests someone who matches his credentials provided insider information that enabled others to bet against the Blazers during a basketball game in 2023.

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Maxine Bernstein

www.oregonlive.com

Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups faces fraud, money laundering charges in court

Chauncey Billups, 49, was granted release with travel restrictions.
www.oregonlive.com www.oregonlive.com
 
I do not have soul of a gambler. Most I ever did was bet dinner with a friend on a game . I know gambling addiction is real. It could explain someone participating in an illegal poker game. But what is charged is way beyond that. This isn't gambling addiction..
I don't understand why. Not money, he had loads. Did someone have a hold on him?
Did he really think he would never get caught?
 
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