Pod Insights Pablo Torre Finds Out Moose, the Money and a Garbage-Time God: A PTFO Investigation About this episode How did a seemingly random super-fan on NBA Twitter know about a federal gambling investigation... before the NBA did? And how does he connect to Carmelo Anthony, Nicolas Cage, Larsa Pippen, Jontay Porter, a legless woman, Malik Beasley, "Madea's Family Reunion," meme coins, and perhaps the greatest play in modern Knicks history? Correspondents Tom Haberstroh and Amin Elhassan join Pablo to run the numbers, grind the tape, and uncover a secret world of penthouse poker games and deleted accounts.
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Transcript 11,562 words · 25 speakers
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0:00 Speaker 00 Network freedom and flexibility. That's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals. No kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to bill Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.
0:32 Pablo Torre? This episode is brought to you by apollo.io. A lot of the stories on this show start the same way. Something that looks pretty simple turns out to be a mess once you look under the hood. Well, it's no different in the sales world. Your team has a tool for finding prospects, a different tool for reaching out to them, and a third for keeping track of it all. On paper, that's a system. In practice, it's a salesperson spending the better part of the day copying names from one tab into another and not much of it actually selling. Apollo.io is a platform that helps sales teams find the right buyers and reach out to them. It brings prospecting, outreach, and follow-up into one place instead of several separate tools. It's used by sales teams of all sizes,
1:16 Pablo Torre? from small businesses to larger organizations, and it's built for teams who want less manual busywork and more time with buyers. If your marketing and sales teams are trying to work from the same view of the customer, it's worth a look. Sign up for free at apollo.io. That's apollo.io. I'm Pablo Torre, and this episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out is brought to you by Remy Martin 1738 Accord Royale, exceptionally smooth cognac for all your game day festivities. Please drink responsibly. Because today, we're going to find out what this sound is.
1:52 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, I know a lot of people in the basketball and the gambling space. So, you know, work does get around. Um, eventually it gets to me from people that I know.
2:04 Pablo Torre? Right after this ad.
2:11 Pablo Torre? I have slept for like four hours. We have been reporting this up till this second. We're still reporting it as we're recording this. We don't have time to waste, unfortunately. This is a very serious story, a very stupid story, and I think an almost shockingly smart story.
2:27 Speaker 03 Comedy comes in threes. It's a funny story.
2:30 Speaker 04 I feel like we're gonna get another revelation. Based on how this morning and this past couple of weeks have gone, we're gonna get something else here, Pablo. So just stand by as we're taping this.
2:39 Pablo Torre? We continue to live, the three of us, rule of three, continue to live inside a rabbit hole that can only be described also as dank. It stinks of all sorts of things, including literally weed. So thank you to Tom Habris, Joe and Amin Elhassan for reprising your roles as PTFL correspondents. It is great to have you here. It's great to be here.
3:00 Pablo Torre? Okay, so the reason I am Voltroning here with my friends Tom and Amin, the internet brain co-hosts of Basketball Illuminati, is because this episode is gonna be an investigation. An investigation into the newest and quite possibly weirdest mystery in the era of legalized gambling on professional sports. And this investigation required not only a dozen sources, as well as the kind of statistical insight you can only get at tomthefinder.com, but also in Amin, a former Phoenix Suns exec who loves Nicolas Cage movies, as you will see. Because in April of 2024, as you might recall,
3:43 Pablo Torre? an obscure Toronto Raptor named Jontay Porter got banned for life from the NBA for betting on and tanking games, allegedly, as early as January 2024. Porter ultimately pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in connection with a deli owner named Amar Awade and a few other gamblers. And on our YouTube channel, by the way, you can now see a photo of these co-conspirators from the federal complaint. Amar Awade is the guy in the top left in the red hoodie. But that was then. A couple of weeks ago, on the eve of NBA free agency. The spotlight turned to someone new.
4:24 Speaker 05 This is a serious development for one of the NBA's top free agents right now. Sources tell me the U.S. District Attorney's Office is investigating Detroit Pistons guard Malik Beasley on allegations of gambling on NBA games and prop bets. I'm told it was during allegedly the 2023-2024 season. Beasley and the Pistons were in serious talks on finalizing a three-year, $42 million contract that would have brought Beasley back to Detroit.
4:51 Speaker 06 The Pistons have added Duncan Robinson. They added him because Malik Beasley has some financial problems. He's got a federal investigation.
5:02 Speaker 07 Sources told me this situation is worse than the Porter situation.
5:08 Speaker 08 Oh, they released the information for a reason. The timing of the release is for a reason. The government wants to get as much attention as possible.
5:16 Speaker 09 Oh, this is FBI? This isn't local? This is FBI?
5:20 Speaker 10 Yeah, this is under federal investigation.
5:22 Speaker 09 Oh, listen, brother, look. I know one thing, concern two things for sure. If it's local police, you got a 50-50 chance against the government.
5:34 Pablo Torre? And if this scandal is the first you have ever really thought about Malik Beasley, perhaps because you're not addicted to NBA Twitter, as the three of us are, I get it. Malik Beasley is not super famous. He's played for six different teams. In fact, aggressively gambling on Malik Beasley was itself a red flag. According to ESPN, what one U.S. sportsbook detected was, quote,
6:00 Speaker 04 "Unusually heavy betting interest on Beasley's statistics beginning around January 2024." This was when Malik Beasley was actually with the Milwaukee Bucks, and that was one game, January 31st, 2024. The sportsbook reported something very suspicious happened. Quote, "The odds on Malik Beasley recording fewer than two and a half rebounds moved significantly at sportsbooks before the game due to a surge of action on the under."
6:32 Speaker 03 Not a common gambling.
6:36 Speaker 03 Subject, right? Like, people are betting on LeBron's points plus rebounds plus assists, or Giannis over/under on dunks for 3-pointers made by Steph Curry. You're not digging deep for Malik Beasley rebounds.
6:48 Pablo Torre? And so, on the eve of free agency, we are told, when news of the resultant federal investigation broke, the Detroit Pistons were staggered.
6:58 Speaker 04 They had met with Malik Beasley, according to sources that I talked to, Malik Beasley and his agent, and were basically ironing out the markings of a $42 million contract. Three years, 42 million, which, if you look at the capology, that's basically the full mid-level exception.
7:16 Pablo Torre? Which Malik Beasley was so, so, so close to getting. In fact, if there's one more thing to know about Malik Beasley right now, it is that as a basketball player, he is radically different from Jontay Porter.
7:33 Speaker 04 Malik Beasley is one of the greatest, full stop, greatest 3-point shooters in NBA history. He had the Minnesota Timberwolves' single-season 3-point field goals made record. And then a couple of years later, he did the same thing with the Detroit Pistons.
7:48 Pablo Torre? The list, this past season, it was Anthony Edwards very narrowly, just ahead of Malik Beasley, who was ahead of Steph Curry.
7:56 Speaker 04 Malik Beasley, statistically, has scored more 3-pointers per minute than any player in NBA history, except for Steph Curry. Think about that. We are talking about, in a 3-point era, Malik Beasley does more of these things than anybody who played at least 500 games in their NBA career, except for Stephen "War" Dell Curry.
8:19 Pablo Torre? The reason why Malik Beasley, that number, that money vaporized, by the way, possibly, Malik Beasley's career now has vaporized. At age 28, and this led us to then try and monitor as much activity as we could ourselves by grinding tape, what's publicly accessible. And so, what did we do? We looked for every piece of evidence we could find in the public record. And this happens to also be how we found this clip, which was buried inside a vlog on Malik Beasley's YouTube channel from six months ago, during the best NBA season of Malik Beasley's career, when he was with the Detroit Pistons. And Malik Beasley is pushing a shopping cart through a Target in Detroit, and he suddenly gets spotted by an employee at the store.
9:04 Speaker 11 No, bro. Hey, what's up, bro? Oh, what's going on, bro? That's crazy. What you looking for, bro? Uh, I need a monitor, but it's all good. I gotta go practice.
9:12 Speaker 07 Yeah. You ain't got time?
9:14 Speaker 11 Huh?
9:15 Speaker 07 Yeah, I got time.
9:15 Speaker 11 Y'all been on the [BLEEP] air, bro. Appreciate it. Real [BLEEP]. Thank you. Do you have a... Y'all making my FanDuel turn the [BLEEP] up. I can't hear that. I can't hear that.
9:22 Pablo Torre? Malik Beasley holding his hands up in the air and saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, FanDuel. I can't talk about that. That's right. And as we will find out in this story, everything is so complicated. Like even that little clip, and that's not even a clip that's been circulating on Twitter or Reddit or TikTok. We found that one buried, but the stuff that's been going viral. There's one in particular, right? That is back to his days in Minnesota.
9:44 Speaker 04 This Minnesota one viewed 14 million times. And everyone that I talked to in reporting out this story, they had all seen this clip. And they'd all laughed at this clip.
9:53 Pablo Torre? Everybody.
9:53 Speaker 04 In ways that everybody, where it's just like, I mean, come on. What this clip is showing us is a very alert Malik Beasley with five seconds left in the game, waiting for a free throw to be attempted by the Clippers, who are up big in this game. The Timberwolves are going to lose this game. But Malik Beasley doesn't just get the ball and let the clock run out. He gets the ball and sprints all the way down the floor.
10:17 Speaker 12 Beasley's gonna get it off. One last shot. How about Beasley? 21 points.
10:22 Speaker 04 And then does a two-handed dunk right before the buzzer. And what's interesting is that that cut the Clippers' lead from nine to seven. The spread on that game, guys, was eight and a half. So, went from the Clippers covering to the Minnesota Timberwolves covering after that play.
10:41 Speaker 03 The thing I'm fascinated by is the amount of people saying, there it is. Proof. Oh, that's proof. You see, you see how he looked over there on the bench? And then he looked up at the score. That's proof that these guys are gambling. I'm like, you're basically accusing someone of the ultimate crime within this profession. And so you get viral tweets with someone saying, Malik Beasley's 100% going to jail. Or, yeah, he's done. He's finished. It's just wildly irresponsible.
11:12 Pablo Torre? Here's the complexity, though, that Tom is alluding to. Malik Beasley has already been to jail.
11:18 Pablo Torre? Separate story, we're gonna get there, I mean, we're gonna get there, we'll explain that in a bit. But one source I spoke to, who was close to several of Malik Beasley's current and former NBA teammates, immediately told me, when I asked if he had heard anything about the gambling issues, quote, "He's a dumbass, I believe everything," end quote. So that's not enough, we had to keep digging. The thing that we got to, guys, the real story inside the story that no one else is really talking about, is this mystery. It is an online mystery that I believe, that we all now believe, is the key to understanding the story of Malik Beasley, as well as this era, the era of legalized gambling in sports
12:03 Pablo Torre? in general. And this mystery started in January of this year with a Twitter user who goes by the name of FreeMoose_NBA.
12:17 Speaker 04 You might remember that on January 30th, 2025, a few months ago, this news broke.
12:24 Speaker 13 Now to a developing story, the NBA confirmed Thursday that suspicious gambling activity surrounding guard Terry Rozier in a game nearly two years ago is now being investigated by federal prosecutors as a part of the same probe that led to the lifetime ban of former Raptors player, Jontay Porter. Now, at the time, Rozier was playing for the Hornets.
12:44 Speaker 04 So Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier, who's under contract with the Heat as we speak, he became the second player, after Jontay Porter, to be publicly identified as a part of this federal investigation into sports betting. And what I'm told is, contrary to Shams Charania's reporting, is that Terry Rozier has not been cleared of any wrongdoing, only that his name came up in the existing federal investigation.
13:10 Pablo Torre? And this relates directly to why Moose is this character that we're focusing on, because FreeMoose_NBA, Tom, speaks to the federal investigation, which clearly is also still ongoing.
13:22 Speaker 04 Right, on that day, the same day that Terry Rozier news drops, this guy, FreeMoose_NBA, tweeted something that was even more provocative, because on that day, he posted, quote,
13:38 Speaker 04 First was Jontay, then was Rozier. Next, you'll hear about capital M, four asterisks, capital B, and then six asterisks.
13:50 Speaker 03 The symmetry of the rule of three.
13:52 Pablo Torre? Jontay, Rozier, M stars, B stars.
13:58 Speaker 04 This guy, Free Moose NBA, posted another tweet right after that one and said, "There's another current player who's gonna have a report come out about them next. Won't say the name, but they play on the Pistons right now."
14:14 Pablo Torre? What this is, is the first documented mention by anyone, anywhere, that Malik Beasley was going to come up as part of this investigation. This is how this news actually breaks. Free Moose underscore NBA has it in that "rule of three" tweet.
14:32 Speaker 04 And in this reporting, I determined this guy, at the time of this tweet, had something like 10,000 followers. And a lot of them were like, huh? Like, what? One of them, later that night, in a tweet exchange with a Pistons fan, because Malik Beasley, at this point, is playing for the Pistons and being awesome. He tells Moose, "You're lying, bro. Show me any amount of proof, bro. You don't know what he means to us." Moose says, quote, "I can't yet. I'm sorry, but gotta protect myself." 15 views on that tweet.
15:01 Pablo Torre? It's incredible. I mean, this 15. This time capsule, which is almost six months before the news breaks, right? On the eve of free agency, six [bleep] months before it happens, it's happening in the mentions of this thing.
15:15 Speaker 03 So that's the crazy thing about this is, maybe you think, oh, he's just throwing [bleep] in the wall and trying to see what sticks, right? Shot in the dark. Then he quote tweets that tweet with a screenshot of a betting slip from January 22, 2024. That betting slip is Jontay Porter unders. Under on points, five and a half, and under on rebounds, three and a half. Now, I know what you're thinking. Oh, yeah, that's the game, right? No, the game that was in the court filings that under investigation was, for the first time, was January 26.
15:53 Pablo Torre? Yes.
15:53 Speaker 03 Meaning whoever placed the slip had the in on the Jontay Porter action.
16:02 Speaker 03 Months before the investigation was announced.
16:06 Pablo Torre? The question here is now very simple, right? On some level, because the entire internet, the entire NBA, we can now confirm this, right? Everybody begins to ask, Tom, who the [bleep] is Moose underscore NBA? How did a random Twitter user on NBA Twitter know about both Jontay Porter and also Malik Beasley on the day that Terry Rozier's name was included for the first time, the second of the three guys? Before any of this was breaking, making things way more complicated is that Free Moose underscore NBA deleted his account and then disappeared off the internet. Nobody, to this day, has been able to solve the mystery
16:50 Pablo Torre? of who is Free Moose underscore NBA. Until now.
16:58 Pablo Torre? That was good. That was good, Papa. I just need people to know this is a story involves not just Free Moose NBA and not just Nick Cage, but also a legless woman, Carmelo Anthony,
17:12 Pablo Torre? meme coins, my old friend Larsa Pippen, and arguably, guys, arguably, the greatest play in modern Knicks history.
17:22 Speaker 12 Hartenstein gets it out to Ananobi. DiVincenzo a three. Bang! Bang! Knicks take a one-point lead with 13 seconds remaining.
17:34 Speaker 12 The Garden is shaking right now.
17:37 Speaker 03 And none of you will ever look at that play the same way again.
17:57 Pablo Torre? Okay, so before we get back to the mystery of Free Moose underscore NBA, we need to also very quickly explain here, as much as we can, where Malik Beasley himself actually comes from. And I did not fully appreciate this until we, again...
18:11 Speaker 04 We got into the rabbit hole on him.
18:13 Speaker 03 I did not know this at all until we started digging into all of this. Malik Beasley comes from Hollywood, right? His parents are both actors. His mom has had small roles in Tyler Perry movies, in The Hunger Games, in Bad Lieutenant Portokal with the aforementioned Nicolas Cage.
18:34 Speaker 14 When was the last time you saw her?
18:35 Speaker 15 I said that morning, I go by and she didn't eat anything. But that morning, she said she needs something from the grocery and she called there and had it delivered by a boy to her home. Help me, please. Please help my baby. Kill her for my family. Please, sir, help me.
18:55 Speaker 03 It's not just Deena Beasley, the mom. It's also his father, Michael Beasley. Not that Michael Beasley, different Michael Beasley. He's got over 80 acting credits on IMDb. Denzel Washington is friends with him. He calls him the king of the Hollywood South because Michael Beasley has appeared in so many movies and TV shows living in Atlantic. And he and Denzel were together in The Great Debaters and Flight and Two Guns.
19:22 Speaker 14 Tell us about your trip. Lawyer. What's the big deal? Lawyer. You were down in Sonora, weren't you?
19:31 Speaker 14 You don't think Agent Jessup and the DA know about you and Poppy Greco? Lawyer, lawyer. They know you were at his ranch? I know I need a lawyer.
19:38 Speaker 04 The fact of the matter is that the actual famous actor that started this all was Malik Beasley's grandfather, John Beasley. He's the most famous one. He was in Some of All Fears. He was also in The Mighty Ducks. And the thing that I just could not believe is that he is the assistant coach that you might remember from Rudy.
20:01 Speaker 16 My job is to basically beat the shit out of you for the next five days. And whoever is still standing at the end, maybe we'll use for our scout teams.
20:11 Pablo Torre? Malik Beasley, if you're wondering, got drafted 19th overall by the Denver Nuggets, out of Florida State. But he also likes to say, if you get him one-on-one, that he was a bit of a child actor himself.
20:23 Speaker 11 Honestly, if you want to see me in the background, I'm an extra. Look in "Madea's Family Reunion." What were you doing as an extra, bro? I was an extra in "Madea's Family Reunion." If you want to see me, I was dancing with my mom.
20:38 Pablo Torre? I don't think any show has ever investigated Madea's Family Reunion more thoroughly than Pablo Torre finds out. We assigned a certain fact-checker producer to go through the film a total of five [bleep] times. We're looking for young Malik Beasley dancing with Dina, right? We're looking for this scene that he describes on that YouTube livestream with Neon. And we regret to report that we could not find this. We found no evidence of it. We are fact-checking every element of this story, as you will see, as much as we can. But something we did find instead is a quote that Malik's parents gave to an outlet called NoizOmaha.com in 2022. According to Michael, his dad,
21:23 Pablo Torre? quote, "Sometimes Malik wants what we have, and so he's in a rush to get it. People think because these guys have a lot of money, they're mature." End quote. Dina, the mom, adds that making millions of dollars at a young age, quote, "does not equate to knowledge or experience." End quote. Which I think naturally does bring us to the time we mentioned before, where Malik Beasley, in real life, did go to jail.
21:54 Speaker 04 What you should know about that incident was it came in the spring of 2020. When Malik was with the Minnesota Timberwolves, he got married to a woman named Montana Yow. And by the fall of that year... His house had been mistakenly added to what is known as the Parade of Homes Tour, which in the Minneapolis area is not just a big event. This is one of the biggest home tours across the country.
22:23 Speaker 17 Now, if you're looking for something to do this weekend that doesn't include large groups of people, how about taking a drive to explore some of the beautiful homes on the Spring Parade of Homes Tour?
22:32 Speaker 08 Yeah, there's 434 houses open noon to 6 today and tomorrow.
22:37 Speaker 04 This is when a car full of people pull up to Malik Beasley's house. And apparently, in the court records of this incident, he had roped off the driveway.
22:47 Pablo Torre? That you're allowed to be in. Your parade is not welcome here, is the implication.
22:50 Speaker 04 Exactly. Move along. And so this car pulls up to the side of the road, not in his driveway, to the side of the road to figure out, what are we gonna do next? And that's when they turn and they hear a knock on the window and Malik Beasley came out. He pointed a rifle at the car. And that incident was reported to the police. The police come to the property, Malik Beasley's house, and they search his house.
23:17 Pablo Torre? And this criminal complaint, I mean, which we pulled on this. You learn that the officers found multiple guns, almost two pounds of weed, a note, this is my favorite detail, a notebook that had written across the cover, in all caps, the word "trap" with two exclamation points. And the notebook contained, in case you were, of course, wondering, quote, "Rules for smoking marijuana in the home." And one of the rules, quote, "Only spend $2,500 a month on weed," end quote.
23:51 Speaker 04 Only.
23:52 Speaker 03 Are you sure that notebook isn't also in Pablo Torre's house?
23:57 Speaker 04 Two months after this incident comes to light, right? He signs a four-year, $60 million extension. His big payday. Like, he did it. He not just made it to the NBA, but he was able to get that big second contract that every NBA player wants.
24:13 Pablo Torre? And what an awesome week for him and his wife, Montana Yow, right? Just imagine, $60 million comes in. Except, three days after that deal gets signed, and this is also while Malik is simultaneously awaiting sentencing for the gun incident, he is photographed, holding hands, at a mall, in Miami, with a masked but unmistakable former PTFO guests, like the two of you, by the name of Larsa Pippen. The ex-wife of Scottie Pippen, future ex-girlfriend of Marcus Jordan, and also, crucially, a recent guest on the Jason Lee Podcast.
24:57 Speaker 18 When you look back on Malik and go, "That was a mistake", why do you think you didn't see it when I saw it?
25:03 Speaker 19 Because I had COVID brain. I had just had COVID. I was stuck in my house. I hadn't gone anywhere. And he was there. And he was like, on me, you know? Like, "Let me see. Let me come see you. Let me come see you." And I thought, "Okay, come see me."
25:14 Speaker 03 It should come as no surprise, everyone, that Malik's wife, Montana Yau, filed for divorce.
25:23 Pablo Torre? And so I just got to jump in here to point out that, yes, all roads do lead to Larsa Pippen. Because of course they do. And from there, Malik Beasley's road gets a lot rockier. He proceeds to plead guilty to a single felony charge of threats of violence because of the whole Parade of Homes incident, telling a courtroom in Minnesota, quote, "I'm not that person," end quote. But then, that person gets sued repeatedly over approximately $8 million in total. And some of this has since been settled. But the list of creditors includes a Maryland firm that specializes in loaning money to pro athletes, his own apartment building in Detroit, his former agent in New York,
26:07 Pablo Torre? his barber shop in Milwaukee, and...
26:11 Speaker 18 Not to be outdone, his dentist in Minnesota is also suing him, Dr. Hassan Ashaabi.
26:17 Pablo Torre? And by the way, Minnesota proceeds to trade Malik Beasley to the Jazz, which trades him to the Lakers, who don't renew his contract. And so he winds up in Milwaukee that way, playing in that game on January 31st, 2024, that got flagged for suspicious betting activity. The season before that, Malik Beasley had been making about $16 million. But Malik Beasley, in the season where all of this stuff is happening, he has dropped his salary 90%.
26:50 Pablo Torre? A 90% pay cut, all of which makes the story of Malik Beasley look as simple as that wildly viral clip of him going coast to coast and covering the spread in Minnesota.
27:05 Pablo Torre? But in the course of fact checking, we wound up giving that clip, that same clip, the Medea's family reunion treatment, as it were. We watched the film over and over and over again before ultimately calling for a deeper statistical analysis.
27:24 Pablo Torre? And we discovered something shocking about its alleged simplicity.
27:30 Speaker 04 It is not simple. I talked to Mike Buie for this story. Like, he is this analytics guru, this mastermind behind this amazing indispensable site called unpredictable.com. And most of the stats on his site are about clutch with respect to the score of the game, meaning, you know, game within five, final five minutes, that's typically what we know as clutch.
27:53 Pablo Torre? Yes.
27:54 Speaker 04 But there's this other piece that until we were reporting this story, I don't think anyone's really kind of done a research project like this, which is, what if we were looking at clutch in terms of the spread? And according to Mike Buie's numbers, he looked at this since 2021, so the last five seasons, here are the numbers. Garbage time, so when the game is out of reach, but Vegas clutch situations, the spread is still in play. Malik Beasley shot 62% effective field goal percentage, which is weighted for three pointers, on 147 attempts. Garbage time and Vegas garbage time situations, which means both the game is out of reach and the spread is not in play.
28:37 Speaker 04 Malik Beasley goes from 62% of field goal percentage up to 64% of field goal percentage. So what this says is, when the game is meaningless in both the score and the Vegas spread, he gets even better. Malik Beasley is a garbage time god. That Minnesota Timberwolves clip, that's just Malik Beasley all the time.
29:00 Pablo Torre? And so I do want to just now focus, though, on the most compelling piece of evidence that has been reported, right? Which is that there was, Tom, this unusual betting activity, this spike in betting activity. This is the seemingly the one and only identifiable example so far that we have. And it's this flurry of bets on the under for Malik Beasley rebounds. Again, a prop bet in that Bucks Blazers game on January 31st, 2024. So what is the real story with that particular example then?
29:36 Speaker 04 Right. The key thing here is that the line was at two and a half rebounds in that game. Where all this unusual betting activity is coming in on the under. Guess what happens? Malik Beasley gets six rebounds.
29:51 Pablo Torre? So the bet is Malik Beasley is going to tank this very tankable category, just not going to try. I mean, and instead, he has one of the better rebounding games of his season.
30:03 Speaker 03 He's busting his ass. You look at the film, he's busting his ass trying to get every rebound imaginable. It looks like Charles Barkley out there.
30:09 Pablo Torre? Again, on our YouTube channel, which you should be at already, like we're going through the video here. You can see it.
30:14 Speaker 04 This is the crazy part of this story is even the betting activity on Jontay Porter. Those cashed because he left the games early, right? And all the alleged co-conspirators were betting the unders. And, and Jontay Porter was taking himself out of these games, effectively clinching the unders. And those bets were cashing. The opposite happened. And, and Malik Beasley, he's out on the perimeter defending his man. The shot goes up and he sprints from across the floor to go haul in a rebound on the other side of the floor over Deandre Ayton, who's seven feet tall. And he's making multiple efforts trying to get these rebounds. You would have thought that the betting activity was on the other side.
30:57 Speaker 04 Based on what Malik Beasley's behaviors in this game is, it is so contradictory to the betting activity, to what he actually did in the game.
31:05 Speaker 03 If the guy was on the take, he was awful at being on the take.
31:09 Pablo Torre? And the through line here, when it comes to this part of the story, right? Is that it's actually, Tom, really hard to find evidence in this category at least of malfeasance in Milwaukee, right? His Bucks tenure on tape, when you grind all of it, you don't see the giant smoking gun. It kind of becomes clear actually that at this point in our journey, the, the most important publicly accessible evidence available to us was not going to come from the Bucks.
31:40 Pablo Torre? It was going to have to come.
31:43 Pablo Torre? From a moose.
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32:28 Speaker 20 Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.
32:43 Speaker 21 People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.
32:54 Speaker 20 And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.
32:59 Speaker 22 One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.
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34:02 Pablo Torre? So the mystery, right? The mystery we've been teasing of how in the hell some random Twitter user had predicted six months before the Malik Beasley news broke that Malik Beasley was gonna become the third NBA player investigated for gambling. This brings us to, I would say, one immediate problem when it comes to contacting an account whose avatar happens to be a stuffed toy moose wearing a little blue sweater with an NBA logo on the front that is also trapped behind bars like in a jail cell, right? This is FreeMoose_NBA, Tom.
34:40 Speaker 04 And the only way we could do that is to go on a moose hunt. Going on a moose hunt.
34:52 Pablo Torre? As every parent knows.
34:54 Speaker 03 I don't know that song.
35:01 Pablo Torre? But speaking of stuff that gets stuck in your head. As we had established, FreeMoose_NBA deleted his Twitter account and disappeared entirely, which is a problem here. But here's the thing. The tweets that tagged FreeMoose_NBA are still around. And after scrolling through a thousand orphaned replies and direct messaging a few of those posters, it became clear that FreeMoose_NBA used to go by another handle. @Moose_NBA. But @Moose_NBA got suspended by Twitter at one point.
35:45 Pablo Torre? Hence the call for freedom.
35:48 Speaker 03 This is the original Moose-NBA account. And the bio says, "NBA takes you can get behind, meme coin expert, and then my favorite emoji, stock chart going up."
36:01 Pablo Torre? And then, deep inside a haystack of hundreds upon hundreds of truly useless tweets that tagged Moose_NBA, Tom found a needle.
36:14 Pablo Torre? A needle posted by a self-described LeBron fan account.
36:19 Speaker 04 This one caught my eye because it not only tagged @moose_nba, but it also tagged a second account.
36:29 Speaker 03 underscore mustafa underscore omar. So he says, "Yo underscore mustafa underscore omar, your [__] got suspended WTF?" Question mark, question mark, "Nooo." And then he tags @moose_nba, heartbreak emoji.
36:46 Pablo Torre? Which I think takes us to what Moose might actually be referring to as a mean is, again, nailing the pronunciation. Because I suppose it mean that some Mustafas also might go by Moose.
37:02 Speaker 03 The most common nickname of anybody with an Arabic name is if your name's Mohammed, probably people are gonna call you Mo. If your name's Mustafa, probably people are gonna call you Moose. Yes.
37:14 Pablo Torre? But the problem with underscore mustafa underscore omar, as you can tell, is that this account didn't exist anymore either. But when you searched for that specific handle, underscore mustafa underscore omar, on Elon Musk's deeply broken platform, something interesting happened. An even weirder account kept popping up. And this one was actively tweeting about the Knicks. This was at 123747484849 lowercase a.
37:55 Speaker 03 This is the Tom Cruise Mission Impossible latex mask of Twitter, right? Where it's just like, numbers. They'll never guess who it is.
38:04 Pablo Torre? But if you obsessively scroll through the tweets sent by at 1237474849 lowercase a long enough, it turns out, you can stumble across another clue, another needle.
38:16 Pablo Torre? And this one was a reply to another former PTFO guest. @WorldwideWob, Rob Perez, a crucial note on the Knicks social graph on Twitter. Because Rob was running a promo where the prize was a signed Jalen Brunson jersey. And when @1237474849 lowercase a replied to Wob and included the screenshot of his personal account on a fantasy sports crypto platform as proof, there it was. In full clarity, for the first time. We had traced FreeMoose_NBA, the account that prophesied that Malik Beasley would be
38:57 Pablo Torre? the next player named as part of a federal sports gambling investigation, to a government name. Mustafa Omar. But now, we needed a face. What we then did was we found the same Mustafa Omar account on Facebook and also on Instagram. And the latter two, Facebook and Instagram, you see young man, trimmed beard, blue top that happens to be a Carmelo Anthony Knicks jersey.
39:32 Speaker 03 How about that?
39:33 Speaker 04 One of the DMs that I sent in the past couple of weeks, I was trying to get to the bottom of this story, and one of the sources sent us a screenshot of a since-deleted post from Moose_NBA himself, which showed the same exact young man with a trimmed beard posting a selfie video while trying on a Knicks varsity jacket at a store. And the caption says here, "Knicks jacket, do we like or nah? Only $75 LOL."
40:05 Speaker 03 But Tom, why would someone save a screenshot of a deleted selfie video about a jacket, should he buy it or not for $75?
40:15 Speaker 04 Because a lot of people do not like Moose_NBA because of what happened next. This brings us back to the original bio of Moose_NBA meme coin expert. But there was this other thing we found, another Twitter account, which tagged Moose_NBA in the bio.
40:32 Speaker 10 The header photo, the header photo is just a pile of money.
40:35 Speaker 04 Is just piles of cash.
40:38 Speaker 04 Piles and piles, a cartoonish amount of cash just as the banner photo. So this account is called Moose and Boulder's Picks. And this account sells, you guessed it, sports betting picks.
40:55 Pablo Torre? Which takes us to a tweet, again dated Thanksgiving-ish 2024. When this account posted, quote, "Join the Discord and forever be esched in the most transparent and successful sports betting Discord there is."
41:12 Speaker 04 Turns out Pablo, that at least a couple of people who had been in this sports betting Discord, they were not thrilled with its level of transparency, or by the way, how good it was.
41:27 Speaker 03 So you're saying they didn't make a huge pile of money like the banner would have indicated?
41:32 Pablo Torre? I mean, in fact, what happens next is that we obtained another screenshot from yet another member of this Discord, which again is basically like a paywalled group chat. And this screenshot shows our guy Moose also using the Discord to convince people to buy a meme coin that he calls the NCA. The NCA stands for National Coin Association.
41:58 Speaker 04 According to one screenshot Moose had tweeted, again, around Thanksgiving 2024, quote, "I had an idea recently to make an NBA branded crypto coin. The idea was to make a Discord community incentivized around the coin. Have a nice GC, like group chat, to talk hoops, gambling, and crypto. The coin was dumped out by bots. I went down with the ship," this account says, "sacrificed $6,700."
42:31 Pablo Torre? And to all of this, one account replies, quote, "It's called a pump and dump, my guy. You knew what was going on here," end quote. This thing that we're looking at is the sort of business that would theoretically incentivize its owner to prove that he somehow has access to money, to inside information when it comes to sports betting picks, which he's selling on this side hustle thing. It would help if you were running such a business to be the guy who was, let's say, ahead on the Jontay Porter news, ahead of the Malik Beasley news, and maybe even ahead of both of those things before not just the internet or the media, but again, the Detroit
43:15 Pablo Torre? Pistons themselves.
43:18 Speaker 04 Right, and so we're trying to follow the money. And when you follow that money, and you follow that 123747484849A account and look at the replies, the artist formerly known as Mustafa Omar is repeatedly bragging and sending people the screenshot of Free Moose himself predicting the prophecy, the Malik Beasley news. So he's out here in this anonymous account saying, "Hey, hey, hey, don't forget about this thing."
43:48 Speaker 03 This is insane. You guys understand that?
43:51 Pablo Torre? It's so funny to me.
43:52 Speaker 03 Like, let me think if I can follow the logic here. He's like, "Hey, you should trust me because I have the inside scoop on what bets are gonna hit." Well, how do you have that? Well, because I know they're cheating. The whole point is, "Oh, I know," not "I know because they're fixing it."
44:10 Pablo Torre? And so as we're scrolling through these brags, right? This is the reporting process. We're scrolling through these brags, brag, brag, brag, brag, brag, brag. I had a question that occurs to me as I'm just seeing this happen over and over again. And the question for Tom was, if you were to slide into those DMs, Tom, do you think Mustafa Omar might actually want to talk?
44:39 Speaker 10 What's going on?
44:41 Speaker 02 Not too much, my man.
44:43 Speaker 10 How we doing on this fine Tuesday?
44:47 Speaker 02 Not too bad. I'm busy at work, but not too bad. I took a little time off.
44:53 Speaker 10 Oh yeah? What's work for you?
44:56 Speaker 02 I am a major at a auto collision shop.
45:00 Speaker 10 Okay.
45:03 Speaker 10 Very cool. And where's that at? In New York somewhere?
45:06 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah.
45:07 Speaker 10 Okay. Well, cool. So, uh, thanks for getting back to me. We're doing like this story on Malik Beasley and your Moose stuff came across when we were like going into the story. And so finally connecting with you is great. Um, and so thank you for, for picking up.
45:29 Pablo Torre? I love Tom's just like, what level of bro am I doing here with crypto gambler?
45:35 Speaker 04 You can hear like my, my throat is getting dry. Like I can't believe this guy is talking.
45:40 Pablo Torre? It's incredible. I mean, it's just the, I mean,
45:42 Speaker 04 How you doing on this fine Tuesday? Like, what are you talking?
45:46 Pablo Torre? The most journalistic, tried and true method of knocking on the **** front door.
45:51 Speaker 04 So what I find out is that he's in his twenties. He is a Knicks fan, not just a Knicks fan. He is a Knicks super fan and he goes to Madison Square Garden and everything.
46:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, a bunch of times.
46:03 Speaker 10 Who would you say is your favorite Knicks player of all time?
46:09 Speaker 02 Gotta be Mello.
46:10 Speaker 10 Carmelo Anthony?
46:12 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's gotta be Mello.
46:14 Speaker 04 But even more than that, when it comes to NBA Twitter, this guy says he's very well connected. Mustafa Omar likes finding out stuff too.
46:25 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, I go by Moose. I know a bunch of people.
46:30 Speaker 02 involved in the NBA space, so if I have any questions, I'm able to eventually get them answered. The way that like your reporter do go and you ask your questions to everybody and you try to get whatever. I kind of do the same. I just do just good research as well. I'm a stats guy. I was giving out stats and stuff that people wouldn't normally think of. My first ever post was a playoff scenario chart, very similar to the one that NBA PR account on Twitter posted, but mine was a day before and then theirs looked identical to mine, which was very funny. So everybody kind of called out the fact that the NBA PR account basically ripped off my scenario chart.
47:14 Speaker 02 I started growing my account relatively quickly, got suspended, not sure why till this day. Made a second account. That one also got suspended and now I'm kind of just off the grid over it because my accounts keep getting suspended.
47:29 Speaker 03 Did he ever find out why he was getting suspended?
47:32 Speaker 04 Well, he says he doesn't know.
47:34 Speaker 02 I wasn't like the most family friendly account either. I'm sure some things that people are gonna take to liking sometimes. I'm sure that's possible.
47:45 Pablo Torre? I do like at this point how this guy is kind of all three of us in one person. He loves finding stuff out. He loves stats. He loves talking on Twitter unapologetically, like a bean.
47:57 Speaker 04 And he is the sort of guy, again, who wants people to know that he knows things, including a forthcoming report about Malik Beasley. So on January 30th, 2025, the same day that the federal investigation into Terry Rozier was announced, he tweets that thing out, the prophecy of Malik Beasley.
48:18 Speaker 02 I mean, I just did it to be a little cryptic. I knew nobody would believe it, but obviously it's fine. I just put it out there just to be a little like cryptic from when it did come out. People could look back at it the way that they did when the news that came out.
48:32 Speaker 10 But how did you come across the Malik Beasley info?
48:36 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, I know a lot of people in the basketball and the gambling space. So, you know, word does get around. Um, eventually it gets to me from people that I know. Uh, obviously people I'm not gonna like to hear names, but I do have people that that do know a lot about, you know, the gambling ring and NBA and stuff. And I didn't know about Beasley during when he was actually doing it.
49:03 Speaker 04 And just to be clear here, uh, that's Moose talking, right? He's saying Malik Beasley did it. That's not us saying that.
49:11 Speaker 02 I found out this past January 2025. And obviously now they are suffering, having to let him walk in free agency and replace him with somebody like Duncan Robinson, who's not even close to the caliber player that I thought Malik Beasley was this year.
49:27 Speaker 04 Damn.
49:29 Speaker 03 Damn. Whoa. Yo, uh, this is one of my favorite things whenever we doing content, Pablo. In my mind, Duncan Robinson sitting back saying, huh, a new episode of Pablo Torre finds out, let me watch. And he hears that, like, what the fuck did I do? Why I get [bleeped].
49:45 Speaker 04 So when I asked Mustafa Omar, uh, who told him about Malik Beasley specifically, he kept claiming that this was something he saw on Reddit, which was kind of strange.
49:59 Speaker 02 This is something that was dug up from Reddit. I mean, everything that I found and I tweet about, I only tweet about it because I find it publicly first.
50:08 Speaker 04 I know people, I know things, but also I saw this on Reddit.
50:12 Pablo Torre? Again, of course, we, Medea's family reunioned this. We scanned through everything we could find on Reddit, looking for a hidden Malik Beasley. Where is Malik Beasley here? We could find nothing resembling this prediction. And of course, by the way, to state the obvious again, if this was publicly noted anywhere, then we would have probably heard about it in the way that we heard about this tweet. It would have gone viral, it would have been surfaced, the prophecy would have been someone else's and not Moose's.
50:38 Speaker 03 Can I play devil's advocate and say none of us knew Malik Beasley's dad and his mom and his grandfather were all actors?
50:46 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's a fair point.
50:47 Pablo Torre? Fair 1% seated out to put into this.
50:50 Speaker 04 So then I started asking Mustafa Omar, Moose, about the Jontay Porter FanDuel betting slip that he posted, which again was placed on January 22nd, 2024, months before the Jontay Porter investigation was ever public. Now, when I asked him about this, he became cagered than he'd been at any point in our conversation.
51:14 Speaker 02 Uh, I said, I don't know much about the slip. Like I said, it was just sent to me from someone, but um...
51:20 Speaker 04 He said it was sent to him from someone else. It wasn't his betting slip. He just happened to get it and then post it onto his account. And this is where we should mention something we have not yet told Moose, which is that deep in our reporting, we found yet another screenshot. Yes, another one from Moose's private paywall Discord, where he was trying to drum up business for his next meme coin, the sequel, not just National Coin Association, which he apparently, you know, lost his shirt on. The goal this time, a quote, "over 100 million market cap," end quote. And on November 27th, 2024, he wrote explicitly, quote,
52:04 Speaker 04 "This next project is going to have people involved that no other project would even be able to get their hands on. Some names I can't even legally mention because they made so much money off a certain NBA gambling incident last season and are facing trials, but they will be involved in this."
52:26 Speaker 03 So, hold on. At this point in time, November 2024, the only gambling incident known, confirmed in the NBA is Jontay Porter.
52:38 Pablo Torre? Yes. In the Jontay Porter story, the feds found this deeply sloppy private Telegram chat. And the most memorable character in Jontay Porter's group chats was the owner of a deli, I mean, on Roosevelt Island here in our city of New York. And this deli owner, who I mentioned at the top of the episode, was not merely a person that Jontay Porter owed, quote, "significant gambling debts to," according to federal prosecutors. I also remember this deli owner as a New Yorker because he had been previously embroiled in a scandal of a different kind. And this is the scandal that involved an unhoused woman who fell into the subway tracks
53:21 Pablo Torre? as the F train was approaching. And as a result, she lost both of her legs. This woman sued, wound up settling with the MTA, which runs the New York City subway, for $4 million. The person that she trusted to cash one of her final settlement checks for around $800,000, according to these legal documents, happens to be this same deli owner.
53:51 Speaker 03 What the [bleep].
53:55 Pablo Torre? By the name of Amar Awade. And Amar allegedly took that check, the city's payback, to, again, a homeless, legless, wheelchair-bound woman who was also suffering from mental illness. He took that check to his friend who was a bank manager, and then they got the $800,000 deposited into the account of his deli, which Amar denied in court in a case that was eventually dismissed, although he did admit that $80,000 did wind up in his personal account. So prosecutors, for the record here, alleged that he spent the woman's money on, quote, "gambling trips and wedding expenses, including a bachelor party in Las Vegas and honeymooning
54:40 Pablo Torre? in Turks and Caicos." This is as dark as it gets, this story.
54:46 Speaker 03 I missed the part where we were talking about Larsa Pippen. Things were so lighthearted back then.
54:51 Pablo Torre? What I want our audience to know is that what I started doing at this point was comb through every publicly accessible social media profile we had ever found for our guy, Moose. And while looking through the names of the people that Mustafa Omar is friends with on Facebook, I found one extremely familiar name.
55:15 Speaker 03 Let me guess. Amar Awade.
55:19 Speaker 03 Nail in this pronunciation.
55:21 Speaker 15 God damn it, that was good.
55:33 Speaker 20 Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.
55:47 Speaker 21 People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.
55:58 Speaker 20 And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.
56:04 Speaker 22 One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.
56:09 Speaker 20 So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.
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57:39 Speaker 03 So he's not lying when he says, "I'm connected with a guy who's involved in the NBA's gambling incident."
57:46 Pablo Torre? Yes, a certain NBA gambling incident. There in fact is a connection. We have just verified that. They are literal Facebook friends. And furthermore, what I did with my life was I naturally plunged further into the Amar Awade rabbit hole. And this one brought me to a source that I encountered here in New York City, who knew him from back when they were both frequenting these allegedly illegal private poker games in Manhattan around five to eight years ago. And my source says that this game that they were playing in actually took place in a private apartment. This is how this worked. Residential building, top floor, just blocks away from Madison Square Garden, actually. It has since moved, but that's where it was at the time.
58:31 Pablo Torre? And it's a sort of game where the minimum buy-in is $2,500, AKA the monthly allotment for weed, according to the trap rules, that we encountered before. There is no maximum, it turns out. And it's otherwise full of lawyers and doctors and hedge fund managers, and also, according to my source, several of the names on those Jontay Porter group chats, who also wound up getting arrested. One of those Porter associates who got arrested was a dealer at this poker game, I am told, another dealer who went by the name Bruce. And both of those guys, obviously, also got ensnared in this probe. And anyhow, when I showed my source to, again, fact-check
59:16 Pablo Torre? this profile, this Facebook profile of Amar Awade, what he immediately said, without any knowledge of any of this episode, I didn't mention Mustafa Omar and how they're friends or anything. I showed him this photo, and my source just immediately laughs over the phone. And he identifies him as, oh, yeah, I have stories about this guy. And what my source told me is that even after Amar was identified as being involved in the Jontay Porter investigation, remember, Jontay Porter was banned for life from the NBA as of April 2024, Amar was still texting people trying to set up poker games.
1:00:00 Pablo Torre? Quote from my source, "I do remember thinking, is he so arrogant that he thinks he's above this?" End quote. This takes us directly back to the phone call that Tom was having with the guy who loves Carmelo Anthony, who was Facebook friends with Amar, who had also just been telling you, Tom, I believe, the following about the Jontay Porter betting slip screenshot that he tweeted out back in January of 2024.
1:00:31 Speaker 02 I don't know much about the slip. Like I said, it was just sent to me from someone, but.
1:00:38 Pablo Torre? So here, I had to do the most important thing in this conversation. I had to ask Moose about his connection to Amar directly.
1:00:48 Speaker 10 Are you friends with, or do you know Amar Awade?
1:00:52 Speaker 02 No.
1:00:54 Speaker 10 No?
1:00:57 Speaker 02 No.
1:00:59 Speaker 10 Okay, because I saw that you're Facebook friends with Amar, and so I figured maybe that was somehow you could, you were associated with him.
1:01:08 Speaker 02 No.
1:01:10 Pablo Torre? That's it. Just no. Like, this guy's been super chatty this whole time, and when I bring up Amar Awade, just one word, no. Which brings us back to the Facebook profile of Amar. Another photo that you can see on it at the top, the banner photo.
1:01:34 Speaker 04 It's a bit blurry. It's like someone is taking the photo from way back in the like 300 section and it's kind of zoomed in. At the center of this photo is a guy who looks like Amar, standing courtside on the baseline at Madison Square Garden. And what's important here is that in this moment, this person is also dapping up a tall black dude dressed in all yellow, a yellow sweater with matching yellow shorts, wearing a baseball cap. The photo was uploaded, you can see it on the Facebook profile, the photo was
1:02:13 Speaker 04 uploaded on April 23rd, 2024. So this is during the 2024 NBA playoffs. So what do you do? You go to the game logs, you go to basketball reference, schedule and results, you click just to see if the Knicks were playing any time around that date on April 23rd, 2024. And you can see on that date, in the Knicks' schedule, April 22nd, they beat the Philadelphia 76ers in an extremely dramatic game at the Garden.
1:02:52 Speaker 12 Hartenstein gets it out to Ananobi. Divincenzo at three. Bang! Bang! Knicks take a one-point lead with 13 seconds remaining. The Garden is shaking right now. What an incredible sequence. Rule of three.
1:03:09 Speaker 04 The rule of three.
1:03:15 Speaker 04 So I just got to jump in here to point out that this game at Madison Square Garden happened five days after Jontay Porter got banned for life from the NBA, which means that it also happened while the feds were actively investigating Amar Awade, who was standing right there courtside, for his role in that same historic gambling scandal. And now, when you pull multiple angles on this specific play...
1:03:44 Pablo Torre? What you can clearly see in retrospect is the identity of the tall, black dude in all yellow, and his name, Omar Awade, is dapping up in his Facebook banner photo after arguably the greatest play in modern Knicks history. Because, of course...
1:04:00 Speaker 03 It's Moose's goat, Carmelo Anthony. Amazing.
1:04:06 Pablo Torre? He looked jubilant. He couldn't, it looks like he's, the happiest day of his... I mean, look, you can really appreciate, by the way, that just the thread count on this yellow sweater in this photograph, and even on the broadcast, you can tell, this is, I mean, he's looking great. All of which reminded us of something. Something we had found pretty early on in our search for any tweet that had tagged "Moose underscore NBA." We had found an angle of this play, of the three, from the baseline shot off a cellphone, and the video credit was, quote, "Courtesy Moose underscore NBA."
1:04:44 Speaker 03 Get the [bleep] out of here.
1:04:46 Pablo Torre? It's right there. Right there on the right side of your screen. This is the thing that hit us, literally, as we were sitting down to tape today.
1:04:57 Speaker 04 Now, let's watch this same play from the Madison Square Garden camera that's looking straight out at the basket. So you can see the full baseline, and let's zoom in.
1:05:10 Speaker 03 Enhance. Give me a little bit more, can we get a little, a little bit of more of a zoom there?
1:05:15 Pablo Torre? Oh my...
1:05:16 Speaker 03 You see that? See the guy in blue right there?
1:05:21 Pablo Torre? And after countless more hours of Twitter and Facebook searching, we realized something. The guy sitting next to Omar Awade, whose picture is holding his cellphone, which I can only assume is the cellphone he used to shoot the video of that Dante DiVincenzo 3, had actually identified himself on Twitter by name as the guy who taped it and sent it to Moose underscore NBA.
1:05:45 Pablo Torre? And we saw this because Cellphone Guy, it turns out, was beefing with Barstool Sports, which had aggregated the video without giving either of them credit. And by now, as a student of the Rule of Three, Tom easily recognized Cellphone Guy. He was a third person, we had noticed, while combing through various Facebook albums. A person better known as Amar's brother. Omar Awade. And even though Moose denied even knowing Amar to Tom, we found more pictures. Pictures of all three of these guys. Graduations, parties, weddings. We even found a video of Omar
1:06:29 Pablo Torre? wearing a Spree Well jersey, going to a Knicks game with Moose, who was wearing a Carmelo Anthony jersey that by now, all of us had seen a lot.
1:06:41 Speaker 24 What's up, everybody? It's your boy Omar, the newest member of Spectators. On my way to the Knicks game. You see me decked out in the Spree Well. Had to do it to him. Magic is in town. Just smoked him by 30. About to smoke him by another 30. And I'm on the way. Come roll with me.
1:06:57 Pablo Torre? At which point, it became clear that Moose underscore NBA, Twitter's Malik Beasley Prophet, was more than just Facebook friends with alleged Jontay Porter co-conspirator Amar Awade. Moose was his relative. His cousin. Meaning, we had literally gone from Madea's family reunion to Mustafa's. And this is where it takes us back now to the legal documents as we try to connect all the dots here, right? So generally observing the following. In the John Day Porter legal documents,
1:07:40 Pablo Torre? quote, "A relative of the defendant Amar Awade, whose identity is known to me, placed a $10,000 parlay bet through betting company one on the under for player one's three pointers, assists and steals." It goes on to talk about how the relative won $85,000, netting a profit of $75,000. And so, just saying that Amar Awade, in terms of the information he was sharing, who he was bringing into the thing he was already caught up in. We don't know which family member it is. They're anonymous, according to federal prosecutors. But family is literally mentioned in the federal investigation a number of times.
1:08:18 Speaker 04 I had to follow up with Mustafa to make sure he had his story straight on this. So I asked him again. You did not get information on Malik Beasley from Amar Awade, who is part of the Porter case?
1:08:32 Speaker 02 No.
1:08:36 Speaker 02 Like I said, I got it off of Reddit.
1:08:39 Speaker 04 Do you have that Reddit forum that you got it from? That you could show me?
1:08:44 Speaker 02 I could probably find that.
1:08:45 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:08:47 Speaker 02 Would you be fine with me searching it and then getting it to you on Twitter?
1:08:50 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, that'd be great.
1:08:52 Speaker 02 Alright, let's do that, son.
1:08:55 Speaker 03 Despite the preponderance of evidence, from his own posts and his own brags, to having a connection to someone in this, he claims zero knowledge and that he got it from Reddit?
1:09:13 Speaker 04 Yeah, he said he got it from Reddit and it was public. And after I hung up with Mustafa Omar, who promised me to hit me back on Twitter and send that Reddit post that would clear him of all of this and just say, hey, they had it. It wasn't me. What happened next was I logged back into my Twitter account and I DM'd him back a reminder being like, hey, yeah, if you can just grab that Reddit post and send it back to me. Bloop. I got an error message. Net error message.
1:09:49 Pablo Torre? No way.
1:09:49 Speaker 04 Message not sent. Sending direct message failed. I thought my internet was down or that he turned off his DMs. But nope, nope, guys. He had shut down his account.
1:10:00 Pablo Torre? At 1237474849 lowercase a, we hardly knew ye.
1:10:07 Speaker 04 And so I was like, you know what? I'm gonna check his Facebook profile. And guess what? That too, guys, was taken down seconds after we got off that phone. All of it, gone.
1:10:20 Pablo Torre? Unfortunately for Moose, we also love screenshots.
1:10:41 Pablo Torre? So this is, this is the part where we need to sort of like take a step back, maybe breathe, just think about what it is that we're finding out here today. Because the timeline has the Jontay Porter betting slip, right? This is now what Moose had posted. That was dated what, Tom?
1:11:03 Speaker 04 The betting slip, if you look at it closely, it says January 22nd, 2024, okay? The game one in the Jontay Porter case came four days later, January 26th. So that's important here because this actually predates that game one.
1:11:26 Pablo Torre? Which is to say, I mean, that what we are circling here, what we've been exhaustively reporting here actually is ostensibly an expansion of the scope that the Eastern District of New York.
1:11:39 Pablo Torre? The US Attorney's Office had published, which started four days after this. But here we have all of these connections to indicate that actually, the dude who's ensnared in that thing, Amar, is connected to the dude who posted this thing from four days before that.
1:11:56 Speaker 04 So remember, we have the betting slip, January 22nd. We have game one of this inquiry with the feds on January 26th. Then, five days later, we get a flurry of unusual betting activity on Malik Beasley's unders for his two and a half rebounds at a sportsbook that flagged this to ESPN. So we have, within less than 10 days, the betting slip, the first Jontay Porter game, and the Malik Beasley game. We have to note the timeline here that this January 31st game is, it's not like a random game in terms of the timeline of things. It puts it within basically a week.
1:12:39 Pablo Torre? It's all when this stuff was happening. In our example, again, of the rule of three, this is how this all was unfolding. What we've established in that timeline is that there are some things that are documented and undeniable and confirmed in terms of, yes, connecting, or at the very least, moving the dots close together. They're all conspicuously proximate to each other. And by the way, we've also been making calls about Malik Beasley. Malik Beasley's attorney, Steve Haney, Tom, he didn't send us a statement, right?
1:13:21 Speaker 04 Here's the statement from Steve Haney. "Presuming someone is guilty when they haven't been charged with the crime, let alone convicted, is a dangerous narrative. The mere allegations have caused irreparable harm to Malik's image, reputation, and career."
1:13:39 Pablo Torre? The note I want to get to at the end here, by the way, is that when it comes to, so what explains all of this, right? Our investigation continues. It does. It continues because we have reason to believe that these are not coincidences, that these are connections. We have reason to believe that when it comes to unusual betting action coming in on an under, Malik Beasley winds up hitting the over pretty hard through his level of hunger in play. But you also have Moose and Amar and this Facebook friendship and these details and these pictures courtside that we should not say what we are tempted to, but we should
1:14:24 Pablo Torre? present, in the words of Denzel Washington in "Two Guns," one thing might be important for everybody going forward.
1:14:32 Speaker 14 Tell us about your trip. Lawyer. What's the big deal? Lawyer. Does the DA know about you and Poppy Brecko? Lawyer, lawyer. They know you were at his ranch. I know I need a lawyer.
1:14:46 Pablo Torre? And on that note, this is where I should probably mention that the lawyer for Amar Awade, who is currently on house arrest, declined comment to PTFO, as did the US Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York, which is an entity that I now wonder about too. Because what I found out today is that our Moose hunt has actually expanded the FBI's scope of the Jontay Porter scandal, the betting scandal, beyond what the government itself has been able to publicly establish, at least. And we have connected it now to the prophecy of the Malik Beasley investigation, if not
1:15:26 Pablo Torre? Malik Beasley, noted garbage time god, himself. But maybe my biggest takeaway here, as we try to square that particular circle, concerns what it really takes to investigate a scandal like this in the age of legalized sports gambling. And legalized sports gambling is obviously everywhere now. DraftKings was the sponsor of this show for the first year and a half of our existence. They remain the major partner to Metal Lark Media. And to their credit, by the way, they want to catch bad actors. They are incentivized to try and flag those suspicious bits of betting activity.
1:16:09 Pablo Torre? That's how a lot of this stuff is being caught in real time. And yet. This age has spawned a wave of conflicting incentives and new vulnerabilities. And this general confluence, in the words of Moose's Discord, of hoops, gambling, and crypto. Which means that I am left here at the end, presenting my internet-brained, exhausted friends, Tom and Amin, with a disturbing truth about ourselves.
1:16:43 Pablo Torre? The characters everybody needed to study this entire time run the place that we all say we want to leave, but clearly haven't. NBA Twitter.
1:16:56 Speaker 03 The Godfather III. Every time I think I'm out, they pull me back in.
1:17:01 Pablo Torre? The rule of The Godfather III.
1:17:13 Pablo Torre? This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production.
1:17:19 Pablo Torre? And I'll talk to you next time.
Previous Share & Bang & Tell with Dan Soder and Katie Nolan Next PTFO Exclusive: We Sparked an NFL Union Crisis. Here's the Sequel. Page updated November 1, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated