Pod Insights Pablo Torre Finds Out Hoopfellas: We Investigated the "Puppet Master" of NBA Gambling About this episode Basketball's high-stakes nightmare is front-page news. But Pablo has been decoding thousands of pages of court documents, while talking to two dozen sources... and keeping up with Kash Patel, to unmask the would-be kingpin hiding in plain sight. Amin Elhassan joins for a swipe through the jet-setting, sports-betting, tequila-chugging life of a man who might actually connect the mafia to the NBA.
• Previously on PTFO: Moose, the Money and a Garbage-Time God https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4u9--GM9to
• Subscribe to "Pablo Torre Finds Out" on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@PabloTorreFindsOut/
• Subscribe to "Basketball Illuminati" with Amin Elhassan https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/basketball-illuminati/id1610336730
(Pablo Torre Finds Out is independently produced by Meadowlark Media and distributed by The Athletic. The views, research and reporting expressed in this episode are solely those of Pablo Torre Finds Out, and do not reflect the work or editorial input of The Athletic or its journalists.)
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Transcript 11,683 words · 12 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Pablo Torre? Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre and today we're going to find out what this sound is.
0:06 Speaker 01 So that's why I'm saying if anybody thinks that sports betting, you gotta just understand there's going to be highs and there's going to be lows.
0:13 Pablo Torre? Right after this ad.
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1:57 Pablo Torre? I feel like you're either about to arrest me as a member of Immigration Control, or you are very, very well-prepared for this specific episode.
2:07 Speaker 03 If it were the former, I would also have like a mask covering my face right here, you know, like what we wore during the pandemic. Alack and alas, I'm just ready for a poker game.
2:17 Pablo Torre? I mean, I don't even have time to do the nonsense with you because, A, I have a montage I'm about to press play on, and B, this [bleep] has to do with the Department of Justice, which you might have heard about last week.
2:33 Speaker 04 All right, returning to the breaking news out of the NBA.
2:36 Speaker 05 The sprawling FBI probe into mafia-linked gambling and sports rigging schemes are sending shockwaves across the NBA and the United States.
2:44 Speaker 06 The FBI arresting a coach in Portland, as well as current and former players. This is the Inshider trading saga for the NBA. That's what this is. That's why we are gonna take heat. Trump is coming. Big night for the NBA. Wembaiana put on a show. That has now been smeared, because we're talking about this story.
3:05 Pablo Torre? It was really hard to pick which clips would go into that montage. There was a lot.
3:09 Speaker 03 So many to pick from, and yet there's always this incredible desire in me to nitpick, whether it's Kash Patel saying Inshider trading, or Stephen A. Smith saying Wembaiana.
3:23 Pablo Torre? I think I also have to just nitpick and point out that, in fact, this investigation, which Kash Patel is declaring behind that podium, it did start underneath the Biden administration, like years ago. And also, I understand why these charges may have blindsided lots of people inside both the league office here in New York City, as well as various television studios all around the country. But we were not blindsided. Actually, we here at Palatari finds out, I mean, we spoke to more than 20 sources for this episode we're here to do today. From the top of the NBA world to the gambling underworld as well, to the federal courthouses here in the city, to Capitol Hill in DC. And what they told us is the following.
4:07 Pablo Torre? Quote, "Doing anything better than Cash Patel is not a badge of honor, but you guys are even staying ahead of that guy." End quote.
4:17 Speaker 03 I urge everyone to go back to listen to our episode from July.
4:22 Pablo Torre? July.
4:23 Speaker 03 A lot about Malik Beasley, but many of the names that popped up in that episode were very familiar ones that we saw in the indictments that were announced last week.
4:34 Pablo Torre? What are the code names of the two federal investigations that resulted in these two indictments?
4:40 Speaker 03 I hate this more than anything because I know there's someone whose job it is to think of stupid puns that they're gonna name their operations after. These were called Operation Royal Flush and also Operation Nothing But Bet.
5:00 Pablo Torre? Yes, that's right. Operation Royal Flush alleges a multimillion dollar fraud scheme to rig illegal poker games using an elaborate setup involving everything from rigged shuffling machines, to decoy cell phones, to X-ray poker tables, to hand signals, to special contact lenses and sunglasses, not unlike the ones you're wearing right now that can read these pre-marked cards, which is all stuff that apparently poker pros have become hip to. But the real headline here, I mean, is that two former NBA players, current Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups and former Cavs and Lakers assistant Damon Jones, were two of the 31 defendants,
5:43 Pablo Torre? alongside several members, allegedly, of which criminal enterprise? I mean.
5:49 Speaker 03 La cosa nostra.
5:51 Pablo Torre? La cosa nostra.
5:52 Speaker 03 This thing of ours.
5:53 Pablo Torre? This thing of ours. And if you go down the full list of defendants, by the way, you do see guys with nicknames like Flappy, and Spanish G, and Albanian Bruce, and Black Tony, and Black Rob, for the record.
6:07 Speaker 03 You gotta differentiate because if you have multiple Tonys, you gotta say, "Which Tony we talking about? Black Tony? Ah, got it."
6:15 Pablo Torre? And what the federal indictment also wants to make clear... Allegedly, is that Chauncey Billups was not only this whale who attracted poker pros to the table under the guise that a famous multimillionaire athlete would be easy prey. Chauncey Billups was also in on the rigging, according to the indictment, which is something that I discussed with somebody who has played poker personally with Chauncey Billups before, and who agreed to talk to us if we did that thing where we modulate their voice.
6:42 Speaker 07 I remember back in April 2019, I got word from different people in poker that there was this game that was gonna be happening in LA and in Vegas. And it was run around Kevin Garnett and Chauncey Billups. And I'm like, how is this game even happening? And I'm like, this makes no sense. Like, those guys don't play poker. Like, it's weird, right? And a friend of mine, who's a really, really good poker player, who was playing in the game, I remember told me that day about this hand that he played with Chauncey. And he said it was just super weird. And it was like some really big pot, maybe $200,000 or somewhere
7:26 Speaker 07 in that range, where Chauncey Billups just like, put all the money in with a gutshot draw, which is just like a really weak hand. And he hit the card on the river and ended up winning a huge pot. And so immediately, his reaction was like, it's weird. Like, I don't understand this hand. Like, how can he call, like, what, like, I don't understand what's going on in the hand.
7:47 Pablo Torre? And I mean, this is where I just gotta jump in to clarify two quick things. First, a source close to Kevin Garnett told me Garnett did in fact play in a 2019 poker game in Los Angeles, linked to the same network of people indicted by federal prosecutors here. But Garnett initially, apparently, thought he was going to a quote "after-party," not a poker game, and that he chose to leave the game early. Garnett, the source goes on to say, has not yet been contacted by the feds. So just to be clear here, Garnett was used to advertise the game as a whale, but nothing I have seen to date suggests that he played the same role as his old friend and teammate in Minnesota, Chauncey Billups. But the poker of this all, I mean, are you a poker guy? Do you play poker?
8:31 Speaker 03 No, but I play one on TV.
8:33 Pablo Torre? Yeah, you do have the whole like Chris Moneymaker ass sunglasses on.
8:36 Speaker 03 Yeah.
8:37 Pablo Torre? And I'm not either, by the way. I'm not a poker guy either. Uh, but the other thing that I did obtain here, the second thing, is the specific hand that Chauncey Billups played that my poker source was describing. And we're gonna show it on our YouTube channel for all the degenerates out there. But all you need to know for the time being is that on a scale of one to 10, where 10 is the most suspicious, multiple poker experts laughingly described Billups' decision-making in this series of decisions as a 10. Quote, "It's someone who knows what the river is going to be." End quote, meaning that last card that decided the whole thing, which would be difficult, I mean, of course, unless Chauncey Billups was allegedly using a rig shuffling machine in April 2019,
9:22 Pablo Torre? as this indictment specifically alleges.
9:25 Speaker 03 Chauncey Billups in Operation Royal Flush is being charged with basically being the guy who is a face card. Rich people are like, ooh, I wanna play cards with Chauncey Billups. And they'll go and they'll play with him not knowing that the game is rigged and that he knows the game is rigged. He is honey to attract all of these bees.
9:48 Pablo Torre? And Chauncey's lawyer, by the way, to be very clear about it, has said, quote, "He will fight these allegations and that he would not jeopardize, quote, 'his legacy, his reputation, and his freedom for anything, let alone a card game.'"
10:04 Pablo Torre? But I do just need to jump into our conversation with our friend Amin Elhassan, the former basketball operations executive with the Phoenix Suns. Because something else you should know is that Chauncey Billups and Damon Jones and Kevin Garnett are not the only former NBA players who were marketed as whales by the defendants indicted by the federal government. According to multiple sources with direct knowledge of that April 2019 game in Vegas that we've been discussing here, the same one where Billups was allegedly profiting off of that extremely suspicious hand and that rigged shuffling machine, another face card in attendance was current Los Angeles Clippers head coach Ty Lou,
10:47 Pablo Torre? who was, at the time, an assistant coach for the Clippers. Now, sources say that Lou did not play at the same table as Chauncey Billups, the man Lou recently called his best friend, and also the man whom Lou would hire as a Clippers assistant himself the very next year, 2020, once Lou got his current head job. But an open secret around the NBA is that Ty Lou, who lives in Vegas in the offseason, also loves poker and is often seen at what is considered the nexus of the NBA poker world: the Aria High Limit Bar.
11:30 Pablo Torre? Often alongside another retired NBA player whom Lou had separately hired to his coaching staff in Cleveland and who has called Lou "his best friend", Damon Jones. Which makes for, you know, just one hell of a best friend triangle. In fact, in June of 2024, both Ty Lou and Damon Jones sat next to each other on the rail, the poker equivalent of courtside at a playoff game, to watch another friend of theirs compete at the World Series of Poker, as seen on the broadcast of that event.
12:11 Speaker 08 T. Louski, come on, man. T. Louski, come on, man. West side, rolling, die, Ty. What's your number? What's your number? What's your number, T. Lou? Never fail. What's your number, T. Louski?
12:26 Pablo Torre? Last week, we here at Pablo Torre Finds Out asked Clippers PR about Lou's attendance at that allegedly rigged game in Vegas in April 2019. The same one with Billups that was mentioned in the federal indictment. And the Clippers did not respond. But going back to that same game in question, eventually, my anonymous poker-playing source did hear that something was up.
12:59 Speaker 07 A year later, you know, my friend came back to me and said, "For sure, like, that game was cheated." And then other people had heard about that in Vegas. So there was word around the streets that, you know, this game was allegedly cheated, especially because there's some shady people involved running the operation.
13:15 Pablo Torre? So, I mean, in a nutshell, that is just a taste of the horrifically-named Operation Royal Flush, which is further confirmed by a review of my sources' contemporaneous text messages from the time related to that poker hand. But the other federal investigation, Operation Nothing But Bet, which is arguably even worse as a name, it does something more, right? Because it names current Heat guard Terry Rozier, and, once again, Damon Jones, as two of the six listed defendants, all of whom the federal government has charged with wire-frog conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy for their alleged roles in a scheme to use inside information provided by NBA players and coaches about players ranging from Terry Rozier to, apparently,
14:00 Pablo Torre? LeBron James and Damian Lillard. The latter info coming allegedly from a conspicuously thinly-veiled co-conspirator. I mean...
14:10 Speaker 03 Co-conspirator number eight, an individual whose identity is known to the grand jury, was a resident of Oregon. Co-conspirator number eight was an NBA player from approximately 1997 through 2014, and an NBA coach since at least 2021. Ladies and gentlemen, one guy in league history fits that description. It's Chauncey Billups.
14:33 Pablo Torre? It's kind of like they said. And his name is C. Billups, no wait. Chauncey B., the noted Hall of Famer. And I appreciate you, by the way, cleaning up the DOJ's typo. They forgot to put the "of" in resident of Oregon, just as a matter of, you know, just pointing out some stuff here as a journalist. And what's weird about some of the framing here, about how a bunch of mainstream media, and even some of the smartest people in the NBA, how they've been framing the whole cluster [bleep] is that they have been saying this is two non-intersecting, parallel operations. They are two separate operations, but to me, I mean, what we learned three months ago
15:17 Pablo Torre? was that the rigged poker scandal does have some touchpoints at the roots of it with the NBA betting scandal. And the reason I say that is because the character we wound up reporting on three months ago, the focus of our July episode, was who and why.
15:36 Speaker 03 Back in July, as we're going through the Malik Beasley case, we discovered a character named Moose NBA, of various aliases, obviously changing his Twitter handles from year to year after he got banned and blocked one way or another. And Moose, as it turns out, was the cousin of one Amar Awade, who you might recognize that name from the indictments that came down last week.
16:03 Pablo Torre? So just to briefly recap here, in January 2025, this was four months before the news of the federal government's still ongoing investigation into Pistons guard Malik Beasley. Now, former Pistons guard Malik Beasley was broken. Ex-user FreeMoose_NBA predicted that Malik Beasley would be the next NBA gambling scandal. Quote, "First was Jontay, then was Rozier, next you'll hear about M star, star, star, star, B star, star, star, star, otherwise known, again, in that very unsubtle way, as Malik Beasley."
16:40 Speaker 03 Might as well work for the DOJ.
16:42 Pablo Torre? I know. We're unmasking everybody today. But the thing we found out in that rabbit hole of an episode is that, yes, Moose's close friend and fellow diehard Knicks fan and cousin is a person of interest, yes, by the name of Amar Awade, even though, by the way, Moose previously denied that very fact to our friend Tom Haberstroh in a July interview that went from extremely talkative to suddenly extremely strained.
17:07 Speaker 09 Are you friends with, or do you know Amar Awade?
17:13 Speaker 03 No.
17:16 Speaker 09 No?
17:18 Speaker 03 No.
17:19 Speaker 09 Okay, cuz I saw that you're Facebook friends with Amar, and so I figured maybe that was somehow you could, you were associated with him.
17:30 Speaker 03 No. He's a very boastful person, Moose NBA was. And as soon as you heard it, as soon as that name came out, the loquacious Moose, all of a sudden, turns mute.
17:45 Pablo Torre? Because what he knows, and what you now know as a listener to this show, is that Amar Awade is not merely related to Moose. Amar Awade was also a charter member, Amin, of the infamous Jontay Porter group chat, which is the wellspring, I'm here to argue, from which this entire saga actually originates. And for those who don't remember, this is the group chat where Jontay Porter, who at the time was an obscure Raptors backup facing down gambling debt, too, among others, Amar Awade, told the chat he was gonna pull himself out of specific NBA games early, therefore allowing the chat to win money by placing these prop bets on Porter's unders, meaning his underperformance relative to the lines set by gambling operators in Las Vegas
18:31 Pablo Torre? that people were gambling on. And in fact, in a photo that we're gonna show on screen here, you can see Amar Awade in the red hoodie on the left. This is the photo from the exact day that the group chat was allegedly working together to place bets on Jontay Porter. This was taken, Amin, at the illustrious Resorts Casino in Atlantic City. And what you should also know is that before Jontay Porter got arrested last year, according to a court document from June, he had texted this same group chat, these same guys, about, quote, " deleting all the stuff from their cellphones", and warning them also that they, quote, "might just get hit with a Rico", end quote.
19:15 Speaker 03 Criminal mastermind Mr. Porter is not.
19:19 Pablo Torre? Those texts, Amin, were sent in April of 2024. Jontay Porter got banned for life from the NBA later that same month. And less than a week after that, we then found video of Amar Awade, this time not wearing the red hoodie in that photo, but wearing something else, sitting where?
19:38 Speaker 03 Baseline at a Knicks Sixers game in Madison Square Garden, I believe in close proximity to Carmelo Anthony.
19:47 Pablo Torre? Yes, he did dap up Mello. But Amar Awade, for the record, did plead not guilty to wire fraud conspiracy back in December. And he did have his next court date rescheduled after delay and delay and delay until next week. But last week, I mean, catching everybody up here. We very curiously did not find Amar Awade's name in the indictment for Operation Nothing But Bet, the NBA gambling side. But we did find him all over Operation Royal Flush, the whole rigged poker game investigation we talked about. So could you please read from that indictment?
20:27 Speaker 03 The defendant, Amar Awade, also known as Flapper Poker and Flappy, was a resident of Brooklyn, New York, an associate of the Gambino crime family and a member of the cheating teams. Awade was an organizer of the Washington Plays game and with others, organized rigged games at the Washington Plays game, among other places.
20:53 Pablo Torre? Now, I don't know what it's like for you to discover that, oh, we've been, we've been talking about the Gambino crime family on the podcast. But that was a thing that I sat up straight a bit when I read. Because in our previous episode, you may recall that I talked to someone who personally played in multiple private poker games in Manhattan with Amar "Flapper Poker" Awade. And this person said to me that Flappy was texting people to come to his poker games even after Amar Awade was very publicly identified as involved in the whole Jante Porter NBA betting scandal. And yet, the figure we're here to focus on in this episode is not Flappy or Chauncey. It is a different person associated
21:38 Pablo Torre? with that original Jante Porter group chat. I mean, this is a person that we have now spent the last three months investigating. Because I suspect that this person may have served as in fact, the single most important human connection between Operation Royal Flush over here and Operation Nothing But Bet over there.
22:00 Speaker 03 Right now, I feel like I'm Russell Crowe in American Gangster. And we're about to point to the photo of the man really on top of this whole scheme. The guy who brings it all together. All the strings on our Pepe Sylvia board are pointing to whomst.
22:15 Pablo Torre? It is pointing to something we discovered in the days leading up to that press conference that blindsided everybody else. That press conference with the FBI director and the NYPD chief and the prosecutors for the Eastern District of New York. And as you take off your stupid ass glasses, I do think it bears pointing out that what I want to get to might explain so much of what's happened since. Now, after the break.
22:42 Speaker 03 Damn.
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24:38 Pablo Torre? I mean, there are a lot of characters to choose from in this story. I do just need to explain to you how difficult it was for me to focus on a person of interest here who did not send what is my favorite tweet of all time. Please read Exhibit A.
24:54 Speaker 03 Terry Rozier, at T underscore Rozier three, May 1st, 2011. Osama should have hooped instead of trying to kill people because he tall as hell. We updated May 1st, 2023. Don't know where I was at or what I was doing when I tweeted this, but happy anniversary. Dot, dot, dot. I was dead ass curious, laughing, crying emoji.
25:19 Pablo Torre? I mean, it's a good take. It's a strong take.
25:22 Speaker 03 It's a strong take. Osama Bin Laden was 6'7", folks. That's what he's referring to.
25:26 Pablo Torre? The Bin Laden NBA sliding doors timeline. We're in a very different universe. But as strong takes go, I do think it's also worth pointing out that Terry Rozier, on our YouTube channel, you can see this, this is from March of this year. He has some strong takes of his own. Here he is crossing over Nick Batum of the Los Angeles Clippers in Miami. I mean, he's got it, I mean, he's still got it.
25:49 Speaker 03 Yeah.
25:50 Pablo Torre? He got a first round pick in that trade that the Heat made for Terry Rozier from the Hornets.
25:55 Speaker 03 They sure did. Sorry, there's no return policy on that.
25:58 Pablo Torre? Yeah, there was a no backsees policy in the NBA, despite the fact that there are multiple federal indictments looming. But we leave that aside for now because that controversy is not what we're focusing on here. Our focus, Amin, is on the only person in this story with an even richer social media history than scary Terry. Because this person did get named as a defendant in both Operation Royal Flush and Operation Nothing But Bet. And this person, at age 40, is the type of guy who recently posted this on his Instagram account, @bestthatevadidit, which finally went private, regrettably, in the last week.
26:35 Speaker 03 It's a post of a meme, and it says, "Yes, I support LGBT," where the "L" is for Latinas, "G" is for gambling, "B" is for beer. And is this a tax evasion?
26:50 Pablo Torre? That's right. The "T" is for tax evasion, is an illustration of a guy with a sack of money with a dollar sign on it. This meme is the account of one Sugar Shane Henon, who is an LGBT advocate of a different kind. And I've been following this account for the last three months through thousands of pages of court documents and hundreds of social media posts. And it has been a real mind [BLEEP] for me. And maybe it is just me, but in case you're not watching on YouTube, you should know that Shane Henon also looks like this, which is to say that he kinda looks like if Clippers' president of basketball operations, Lawrence Frank, once got arrested in 2006 on a felony charge of, quote, "facsimile weapon of mass destruction," and also a misdemeanor charge
27:35 Pablo Torre? of criminal conspiracy related to using gambling devices in dice games.
27:39 Speaker 03 He looks like a cleaned-up Carl Pilkington.
27:42 Pablo Torre? Yes.
27:42 Speaker 03 You ever watched "An Idiot Abroad" with Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant? He looks like Carl Pilkington if he really took care of himself.
27:50 Pablo Torre? And if Carl Pilkington, in this hypothetical comparison, of course, then pled guilty to the aforementioned charges and got six months probation, only to get arrested for stabbing someone in the neck at a pool hall in Pittsburgh in 2009, eventually pleading guilty to aggravated assault.
28:06 Speaker 03 Is that wrong? We're not supposed to do that?
28:09 Pablo Torre? Well...
28:09 Speaker 03 I gotta plead ignorance on this.
28:11 Pablo Torre? Well, I should point out that less than two weeks after the stabbing, Shane Henon then got arrested for selling cocaine in a casino parking lot, ultimately serving two and a half years in prison.
28:23 Speaker 03 Not a good month for Shane Hennan, huh? All these things happening.
28:26 Pablo Torre? But, after all of that, what sugar Shane Hennan decided to do was start anew. He moved from Pennsylvania to Las Vegas, and over the next decade, I mean, he did what any enterprising young man with that kind of record might do.
28:42 Speaker 03 Works hard at a straight job.
28:44 Pablo Torre? Exactly right. He became an online sports betting expert.
28:49 Speaker 01 Everybody keeps saying, "Oh, my gosh, Shane, you won a million dollars on the weekend. You won a million dollars on Sunday." Like, holy [BLEEP]. So, yeah, it looks like I cashed out a million dollars, but in all reality, I'm only winning like 50, 60K for the week. So that's why I'm saying, if anybody thinks that sports betting, you gotta just understand there's gonna be highs and there's gonna be lows.
29:14 Speaker 03 Pablo, you can go straight to LA and get me the best casting director that Hollywood has to offer and say, "I'm casting for the role of a guy who just got out of jail and is now an online sports betting expert." Just going off of voice acting, though. I don't need to see what he looks like. I need a voice. That's the voice that they provide.
29:34 Pablo Torre? Who also kinda sounded like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas.
29:37 Speaker 01 Funny how? I mean, funny like I'm a clown? I amuse you? I make you laugh? I'm here to [BLEEP] amuse you? What do you mean funny? Funny how? How am I funny?
29:46 Pablo Torre? Could we make that person? And God said, "I got you."
29:50 Speaker 03 Hold my beer.
29:52 Pablo Torre? That clip, by the way, is kinda admittedly almost eerily introspective, right? He starts talking about the highs and the lows, a moment of just sort of like lucidity. I mean, an account that otherwise is, for the record...
30:06 Speaker 01 Quick 90,000 on UCLA plus five and a half.
30:10 Pablo Torre? Hawking pics, posting lots of betting slips, uploading various videos of himself with private jets and stacks of cash at yet more poker tables.
30:20 Speaker 01 Somebody like me is, I'm always looking for an edge to bet with. We look at like weaknesses in the lines where we think the casinos are wrong with the lines.
30:27 Pablo Torre? For instance, I mean, here are two videos that Shane Hennan posted just last month. The first one.
30:36 Speaker 03 I see Shane Hennan, he's got sunglasses on, he's got a white button up shirt, and I believe he's chugging a bottle of Casamigos Reposado.
30:45 Pablo Torre? Well spotted of me.
30:47 Speaker 03 Yeah, thank you.
30:48 Pablo Torre? Your expertise on this subject has been well established. Meanwhile, the second video, right after that one, that I want to show you, is this.
31:01 Speaker 03 Now it's Shane Hennan sitting down in that same white button up shirt, with a champagne flute in his mouth, but he's not holding it up, Pablo.
31:10 Pablo Torre? No.
31:10 Speaker 03 What's holding up the other end of the glass is an attractive young blonde woman in a swimsuit that is padded with what appears to be hundred dollar bills.
31:21 Pablo Torre? Yes, all of that checks out. The cameraman is lingering in ways that can only be described as objectively creepy. But your scouting report is correct. And also, there's another picture I want to show you, which Shane posted in 2018. This one after he had done thirty more days in custody. This was the end result of getting pulled over for a DUI in the suburbs of somewhere in Missouri. And apparently he had about fourteen grand worth of gambling winnings in his car.
31:47 Speaker 03 It is a stack of money, but it's not dollars, Pablo. No, these are euros. And it's like a five hundred euro note, but it's like a stack of a bunch of them. So I don't know, call it maybe about forty or fifty five hundred euro notes, spread out on what looks like a seat.
32:05 Pablo Torre? The five hundred euro note, I do want to take a beat to observe this here. It no longer exists. So this photo was posted in 2018, but most European Union banks had started phasing out this form of currency. Around 2016, 2018, I mean, when Shane posted this exact photo. Because it turns out that in the absence of the American five hundred dollar bill, the five hundred euro note had become the underworld's currency of choice for money laundering and terrorism financing. And in fact, according to The Guardian, the five hundred euro note even had a nickname. A nickname that I dare say Terry Rozier might approve of.
32:49 Pablo Torre? What do you think that nickname is?
32:53 Speaker 03 Oh, man.
32:57 Speaker 03 Osama's?
32:59 Pablo Torre? The Bin Laden is what we were looking for.
33:01 Speaker 03 Close, ah, I went first name. I went too comfortable, I went too familiar, I'm sorry.
33:07 Pablo Torre? Because, quote, "While many people know what it looks like, few have ever seen one." End quote.
33:15 Speaker 03 Oh.
33:16 Pablo Torre? The Bin Laden.
33:17 Speaker 03 You know what? Whoever came up with that, that's who the FBI needs to hire to come up with the operation names. Cause that's great.
33:24 Pablo Torre? I know, that's just poetic. So yeah, few people had ever seen one, unless, of course, you followed Sugar Shane Hennan's Instagram account, which also showed you things like Shane Hennan's literal ass.
33:38 Speaker 03 Let me read the caption.
33:40 Pablo Torre? Please.
33:41 Speaker 03 My ass white AF, laughing emoji. If you not living life, what you doing?
33:50 Pablo Torre? What are we doing as we watch, yes, the time lapse of Shane Hennan's ass swim across truly like beautifully translucent water in the Maldives? The reason I'm showing you all of this in vivid detail, I mean, is because Shane Hennan is not just the guy who once messed around with facsimile explosives and dice cheating devices. He is also, according to the allegations in Operation Royal Flush, the guy who supplied the type of cheating technology used by Chauncey Billups allegedly and his fellow co-conspirators in private poker games, including the elaborate rigged shuffling machine that we mentioned before. And these photos, you can now see, because of that indictment.
34:32 Speaker 03 Yes, it is the Deckmate 2 shuffler. It's been taken apart on a table from the iCloud account of one of the defendants.
34:41 Pablo Torre? And then the next photo, you can sort of see a computer program thing.
34:45 Speaker 03 Image of the computer program showing information transmitted by the rigged shuffling machine from defendant iCloud account. I'm a bigger fan of the Deckmate 1, I like their original incarnation.
34:57 Pablo Torre? The sequel's never as good. But now, I mean, given this backdrop, if we turn to the other indictment, Operation Nothing But Bet, what we find is that Shane Hennan... Does appear again, but he's almost like buried in this indictment. He doesn't lead any of the sections that we can read. And yet, in item number 38, what we learn is that in March 2023, Shane Hennan made use of a tip, a tip allegedly originating from Terry Rozier himself, that Rozier was gonna be taking himself out of a Hornets game in New Orleans. I mean, and the reason that Shane Hennan was told this, according to the government, was clear.
35:38 Speaker 03 So that Hennan, both himself and through a network of straw bettors, could place bets on the defendant Terry Rozier's unders. And later on, it says, "Hennan marshaled a network of associates to place bets on Rozier's unders at Hennan's direction."
35:58 Pablo Torre? And if you keep reading this indictment, what you learn is that Shane Hennan, marshaling this network of bettors to make multiple bets, is also the thing that happened with the information that allegedly originated from Chauncey Billups about his tanking Blazers, and also with the intel about Jontay Porter, whose text message about his one-man Raptors tank job was forwarded straight to Shane Hennan, allegedly. But in this case, the case with Terry Rozier, Rozier took himself out of his March 2023 game after less than 10 minutes as scheduled. And you can see, in fact, this exact moment, I mean, that he started grabbing at his injured quote-unquote "right foot", only for, less than a week later, allegedly,
36:41 Pablo Torre? two other named defendants to come visit Shane Hennan in Philadelphia to pick up their winnings, the winnings they got betting Terry Rozier unders in that game. And some of those winnings, according to this indictment, got delivered back to Terry Rozier himself.
36:59 Speaker 11 The proceeds were later delivered to his home, where the group counted their cash. As the NBA season tips off, his career is already benched, not for injury, but for integrity.
37:13 Speaker 03 You can just tell us what the charges are. They can just say, this is the indictment. This is what happened.
37:18 Pablo Torre? It's kind of like a lot of people finally discover what it's like to be a headline writer for like the back page of the New York Post. And they're like, we're getting these takes off too.
37:28 Speaker 03 Sir, I read the New York Post every single day I was in high school. The people who come up with those back page headlines are like Keats compared to these DOJ hacks.
37:37 Pablo Torre? Right. The New York Post, for the record, went with hoop fellas, which I think is a lot better.
37:42 Speaker 03 Yeah.
37:43 Pablo Torre? You know, but look, headless, body and topless bar, the gold standard. All of us are still just, you know, we're pretending.
37:50 Speaker 03 We're playing for second.
37:51 Pablo Torre? That's right.
37:56 Pablo Torre? But as for the plight of Terry Rozier and him leaving that game in March of 2023 with a supposed right foot problem that you saw before, the NBA says that it was alerted to irregular betting activity by the sports book in question right away. A source at the league office tells PTFO, quote, "Once we heard about it, the wheels started turning. We were deliberate," end quote. But according to multiple sources familiar with the situation, the NBA waited until late spring to conduct its own internal investigation of Rozier, at least in earnest. This was an investigation that would be led by the league's
38:39 Pablo Torre? external law firm of choice, Wachtel Lipton. And Rozier, we are told, sat for a Zoom interview and he handed over his cellphone to the league, which was in turn handed over to league investigators looking for specific search terms.
38:55 Pablo Torre? Except NBA investigators did not find a smoking gun violation on Rozier's phone, according to these sources, and the league ultimately chose to not inform the Miami Heat and other teams about the unusual betting activity stuff before scary Terry got traded to South Beach. And instead, they chose to defer to the feds, who, according to Rozier's attorney, Jim Trusty, quote, "appear to be taking the word of spectacularly incredible sources rather than relying on actual evidence of wrongdoing."
39:33 Pablo Torre? Terry was cleared by the NBA, and these prosecutors revived that non-case, end quote. But on Wednesday, our source in the NBA league office disputed that to Pablo Torre Fines out. Quote, "Terry's investigation was never closed, so he was not cleared of anything. Us not being able to find something is not the same as cleared. It is true, we did not find a violation of our rules, but we did not close our investigation." End quote. And the last thing you should know here is that on Tuesday, Jim Trusty, Rozier's attorney,
40:14 Pablo Torre? went on Fox News to say, quote, "I'm not here to defend anybody else in the indictment. There's a bunch of people Terry doesn't even know if you could pick them out of a lineup." End quote. But what has not yet been reported about the whole cash collection thing that happened in Philly, I mean, is that Shane Hennan, true to form, perhaps, was not exactly laying low here. You may recall, in fact, how we found Shane's friend, Amar Awade, aka Flappy, watching the Knicks courtside days after Jontay Porter got banned for life? Well, on "At Best That Ever Did It," you can see exactly where Shane Hennan happened
40:56 Pablo Torre? to be on March 29th, 2023, when those guys allegedly traveled to Philly to collect.
41:03 Speaker 03 Oh, wow. Here we go. We're sitting, it looks like courtside at a game.
41:11 Speaker 03 With the caption, "When my partner come to Philly and win the drip cam, make me got to step my game up." Rolling laughing emoji, rolling laughing emoji. At Vezino underscore Lox. Ice cold emoji, ice cold emoji, ice cold emoji.
41:26 Pablo Torre? That's right. This is a photo courtside at a Sixers game on March 29, 2023, of Shane Hennan sitting courtside next to his self-described partner and friend and fellow defendant in the NBA betting indictment, named Marvis Fairley, who is gonna shock you, I mean, is also a sports betting expert. He sells picks under his Instagram handle. Yes, at Vezino underscore Lox.
41:56 Speaker 03 It's Vezino Lox, man, on three. Vezino Lox on three, baby, come on. One, two, three, Vezino Lox.
42:05 Pablo Torre? He has, in fact, pled not guilty. Let's be very clear about this. Not guilty for this whole thing. But back in the timeline of this specific federal indictment from the United States government. We go from the Terry Rozier game on March 23, 2023, to the Blazers game the very next day, March 24, 2023, which is when Shane Hennan and company allegedly profited off of inside information, allegedly supplied by head coach Chauncey Billups about Dame Lillard being out of the game. And then, we go to the Jontay Porter scheme, which started with bets in January 2024 and was forever memorialized at that food court in Atlantic City in March of 2024. But in January of 2025, okay? This is this year.
42:50 Pablo Torre? Something important happened, I mean, in the jet-setting, sports betting, tequila-chugging life of Sugar Shane Hennan. Because at the best that ever did it, was finally arrested by the feds at the Las Vegas airport. This was part of the case that originated with his friend, Amara Wade, and the whole Jontay Porter group chat. And I'd like you to please read from the following court document that we obtained.
43:19 Speaker 03 On January 8, 2025, the defendant purchased a one-way ticket to Colombia, connecting through Panama, which was scheduled to depart from Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas, Nevada, HRI, on January 12, 2025. The defendant was arrested in connection with the complaint at HRI as he attempted to board the above-referenced flight to Panama. During a search incident to the defendant's arrest, law enforcement agents found on the defendant multiple cell phones and just under $10,000 in cash. Upon arrest, the defendant also stated to law enforcement agents unprompted that he was traveling to Colombia to purportedly seek dental treatment.
44:00 Pablo Torre? I am told reliably that Colombia might be considered the best that ever did it at dentistry.
44:06 Speaker 03 They are the Turkey of the Western Hemisphere.
44:09 Pablo Torre? What Turkey is to hairlines, Colombia reportedly is to your grill.
44:14 Speaker 03 They do teeth too in Turkey now.
44:16 Pablo Torre? But there is another passage from the same letter, the same court document that is filed by the acting United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York that I want to highlight here as well. I mean, if you can read this part.
44:29 Speaker 03 The defendant's motive to flee is obvious. The proof of his guilt is overwhelming, and particularly given his substantial criminal history, he may ultimately face up to two decades in prison upon conviction. Among other evidence, witnesses, phone records, financial records, and betting records confirm that the defendant orchestrated and participated in numerous fraudulent wager schemes, which, among other things, resulted in potentially millions of dollars worth of illicit profits and money laundering transactions.
45:04 Pablo Torre? Shane Hennan, in other words, according to the federal government, is the orchestrator of this whole gambling scandal. He was supposed to be charged with wire fraud and money laundering.
45:15 Speaker 03 And this is Russell Crowe putting up the picture. There's our guy. This is our Frank Lucas.
45:21 Pablo Torre? Allegedly. So the question that we've been circling here for months now is this. After Shane Hennan got arrested at the Las Vegas Airport, having orchestrated what the government itself has called, potentially, the largest sports betting scandal in U.S. history.
45:39 Pablo Torre? How in the [bleep] did Shane Hennan get released that same day? Good lawyer?
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46:32 Pablo Torre? So I mean, this is the part of the story where we here at Palatore finds out had to make a physical trip to the Eastern District Courthouse in downtown Brooklyn the day after that giant press conference with FBI Director Kash Patel and the NYPD Commissioner and the whole array of federal prosecutors. Because that courthouse turns out to be the only place that a journalist can access what turns out to be the final entry on Shane Hennan's original court docket. And a docket, for those not familiar, is just the official log of a criminal case from start to finish, gavel to gavel, as it were. And this entry here refers to a transcript of the proceedings in January 2025, the one we mentioned before, which have not yet been made public.
47:15 Pablo Torre? And so when you walk into the courthouse, I mean, you gotta hand over your phone, you gotta hand over all your electronic devices. It's like you're walking into a Dave Chappelle show. Can't record any of it. And what you have to do is log on to a special computer. And then you're allowed to take notes just by hand. And what we found at this courthouse is the transcript of Shane Hennan's 14-minute bail hearing on January 31st, 2025, in New York City. And what you find in that transcript is that Shane Hennan and the US government have started plea negotiations. And that at one point, the judge says the following about Shane.
47:56 Speaker 03 "It appears he understands the application, and it's in his interest, the public's interest, and the interest of justice, to try to resolve this case with the plea, rather than moving ahead with the indictment immediately. So we'll enter that on the docket." End quote.
48:15 Pablo Torre? And what the rest of that docket says is that in the case of the United States of America v. Shane Hennan, Shane Hennan has been released on a $200,000 bond, with some caveats that make clear that Shane should not do the following.
48:30 Speaker 03 "Not leave the following areas, except for travel to and from court, and the checkbox selected is continental United States, and abstain from all alcohol use, shall use his true name only and not use any false identifiers." That is checked as well.
48:48 Pablo Torre? It is also worth noting here, in that the otherwise redacted bail hearing, in which the judge said, quote, "It's been a long time since she'd seen a request to begin plea negotiations so quickly." That same judge then jumped in to ask, quote, "Should there be any limitations on his involvement with betting or other similar financial activity?" To which the assistant US attorney responded that they apparently hadn't really discussed that, which, you know, seemed odd to me as a podcaster investigating a sports betting scandal at least. But you know what? Let's just go with it. Let's actually just take that discrepancy at face value. Because it is also worth reminding everybody that those videos of Shane Hennan chugging
49:30 Pablo Torre? the Casamigos that you identified, and having that glass of alcohol fed to him by that woman covered in, you know, Ben Franklin's face, those were posted by Shane Hennan on September 25th, 2025. Meaning, this was while he and the government continued to negotiate his ongoing plea agreement, according to court records.
49:56 Speaker 03 Pablo, those videos were taken in the continental United States. One out of three ain't bad. That's Hall of Fame in baseball.
50:03 Pablo Torre? That's right. It seems like he was correctly identifying himself as the person not abstaining from all alcohol use on a sheer batting average level. Not bad.
50:18 Pablo Torre? Now, what I should say here is that we reached out to Shane Hennan and his attorney, asking for interviews and sending a detailed list of questions, like whether Shane Hennan should really be considered as he was by the US Attorney's Office, the quote-unquote orchestrating force, basically the puppet master of this whole scandal. Or like, why that whole thing about how maybe Shane should not be gambling while out on bail, and how the Assistant US Attorney was like, "We hadn't really discussed it, but, okay."
50:54 Pablo Torre? I wanted to know why that stuff didn't end up in Shane's official bond agreement in the end, in that whole write-in section alongside the "not drinking" part, and the whole "you must identify yourself under your real name" part, as he, you know, roamed about the continental United States this year. And on Wednesday, we finally received this statement from Shane Hennan's lawyer. Quote, "This case is still in its early stages, and we have not yet had the opportunity to review all of the discovery. Mr. Hennan will be entering a plea of not guilty to all charges in the indictment and maintains his innocence."
51:38 Pablo Torre? End quote. The lawyer then added that he would address the court this Thursday, when Hennan is scheduled to be arraigned in New York City, around when this episode publishes, which raises another key question, as we review evidence hiding in plain sight while searching for sugar Shane.
51:58 Speaker 03 What else is Shane up to, by the way?
52:00 Pablo Torre? So, I'm glad you asked this question because in March of this year, 2025, this is less than two months after that judge let him out on bail as his plea negotiations continued and continued. At Best That Ever Did It posted an Instagram carousel, I mean, with the caption, "Life lately."
52:22 Speaker 03 Oh, this is Instagram royalty right here, that caption. "Life lately," look at that. He's outside.
52:29 Pablo Torre? So that, I believe that's outside the Garden, outside of Madison Square Garden.
52:34 Speaker 03 This looks a lot like Brickell down in Miami.
52:38 Pablo Torre? You're like a geo-guesser for degenerate hangouts.
52:41 Speaker 03 Dude, I'm telling you, like, this is my life. Oh, yep, there he is. He's at a Heat game. He's staring at, oh, someone, and let's now, we're at the Satai. It looks like it's a resort. Miami Beach.
52:54 Pablo Torre? Yep.
52:54 Speaker 03 Drinking it out of a coconut.
52:56 Pablo Torre? I want to go back to that Heat game, the one where he was sitting baseline. The Heat are playing the Clippers, and if we play this thing through, you can maybe tell that he's looking out at a Heat guard that he posted the picture of.
53:11 Speaker 03 Oh.
53:12 Pablo Torre? With the number two, I mean.
53:15 Speaker 03 Guys, we're not doing this, are we?
53:18 Pablo Torre? I mean, who wears number two for the Miami Heat?
53:22 Speaker 03 I believe it's a man they affectionately call Scary Terry.
53:26 Pablo Torre? You may remember, I mean, way at the beginning of this episode, when I showed you that photo of Terry Rozier with a strong take, crossing over the Los Angeles Clippers and Nicholas Batum. This photo was from March of this year. Just to reiterate that, it's March 12th.
53:42 Speaker 03 How do y'all keep getting me on these, man?
53:44 Pablo Torre? It's March 12th, 2025, Clippers-Heat, a game that has not been mentioned in any of the indictments. Enhance.
53:52 Speaker 03 Oh my gosh.
53:54 Pablo Torre? Enhance.
53:54 Speaker 03 You could not have set it up better as a picture, as a framing, right off of Terry Rozier as he's crossing the ever living [BLEEP] out of Nicholas Batum. In the crack in between his upper thigh and his chest, you know, that angle that's being created by his body in the crossover. Right in between that is a blurry image in the background of a bald white man in a black shirt. It looks a lot like Shane Hennan.
54:28 Pablo Torre? It looks a lot like a guy who's kind of like a mix between Lawrence Frank and Carl Pilkington, who kind of sounds like Joe Pesci.
54:36 Speaker 03 Yeah.
54:37 Pablo Torre? That has the skull shape that is distinctly similar to the guy who owns the Instagram account that posted a photo from exactly that point of view.
54:50 Pablo Torre? And so this brings us to the question that we have been circling for months now. And that question is also a question that isn't just raised because of the behavior that Shane Hennan himself was documenting on Instagram. It has been raised because of that story that I referenced before. If you will recall that time that Shane Hennan got convicted for selling cocaine in that casino parking lot that I told you about in 2009, which you may also recall happened less than two weeks after he, you know, stabbed that guy in the neck at a pool hall in Pittsburgh in 2009.
55:21 Speaker 03 That was a real tough month for him.
55:23 Pablo Torre? Yes, that rough month, uh, turns out lasted for a while longer and did not resolve itself until 2011, when then 26 year old Shane Hennan took the stand in what I can only describe as a Mad Lib of a mob trial to testify. We are talking about three ounces of cocaine, a sprawling government conspiracy case against a bunch of alleged associates of the Bosnian ringleader of the branch of a Mexican drug cartel operating in America, and also, and I did not know this existed, some sort of cocaine pressing machine.
56:02 Pablo Torre? All of this taking place in Shane's hometown of Pittsburgh. The Deck Master 3? The equivalent, I can only presume, of cocaine pressing. Anyway, this is where, I mean, I'm gonna invite you to do that thing where we do a table read together. In which you are gonna have to play Shane Hennan, reliving some of his personal legal history, and I'm gonna play the role of the government lawyer. Okay.
56:32 Pablo Torre? Now, Mr. Hennan, you've been convicted in federal court for cocaine dealing, is that correct? Yes, I have. Did you plead guilty, or were you convicted at a trial? I pled guilty. And did you have a plea agreement? Yes, I did. Did the plea agreement have any provisions concerning cooperation? It would just help me to do with my sentence. And when you say it would help you reduce your sentence, what are we talking about? My cooperation. What does cooperation mean? Giving information that I know about. Now, after that, I'm now the Bosnian Ringleader's Associate's Lawyer.
57:13 Pablo Torre? When you got arrested, did you agree to cooperate quickly? Yes. All right, how quickly? That day. As soon as you got popped, you said, "I'm gonna cooperate." Yeah. All right, now, you indicated that you, on many occasions, went to other places to gamble. Uh huh. Did you know that it was a condition of your bond that you were not allowed to leave the state without permission? That I was. You disregarded that. Yes. All right, now, isn't it in fact true that the federal government actually paid for you to go to Detroit? That, they did. All right, and that was so that you could try to set someone up there? That's correct.
57:57 Pablo Torre? You didn't want to go to jail for a 10-year mandatory? That's correct. And you said, "I'll cooperate." That's correct. Real quickly. Yep. All right, because you had to look out for yourself. That's correct. No one else is gonna look out for you, right? That's correct. In fact, no one's really looked out for you your entire adult life.
58:22 Speaker 03 That's correct.
58:23 Pablo Torre? And that's why you're out here hustling and cheating people.
58:27 Speaker 03 That's correct.
58:28 Pablo Torre? And see. Look, the whole thing about who's looking out for who here, I think it's clear that in this deal, that Shane Hennan could not have been more granularly specific about admitting to. In court documents, Shane Hennan looked out for himself. And what you should know is that after that 2011 testimony in that mob trial, Shane Hennan finally pled guilty to the whole cocaine charge. But he was still under supervised release for the next four years until 2015. So he was only allowed to travel in Florida for his alleged new job as a sales rep for a seafood wholesaler. Where according to a 2015 court document, Shane Hennan spent those four years going to Vegas to gamble.
59:13 Speaker 03 That's correct.
59:14 Pablo Torre? This even when the government denied his request. And according to the court document, I mean, Shane Hennan even showed his parole officers his winnings from a trip he made in 2014. Although, again, his parole officers might have also just checked his Instagram account to see the chips that say Bellagio on them alongside one of those slips that you get when you win money at a casino.
59:42 Speaker 03 In case you were wondering, where is he? It's got the money, it's got the chips with the name of the establishment on it.
59:50 Pablo Torre? Hmm.
59:51 Speaker 03 You get what you incent, right? If the incentive structure is provided, reinforce the behavior that you're getting, guess what? You are going to continue to get that behavior. And so, Sugar Shane Hennan,
1:00:06 Speaker 03 it might seem ballsy to us. But as we're presenting more and more of this, this kind of evidence of the pattern of behavior, it's because it was reinforced. The government said it was cool, basically implicitly allowed it to be cool for him to operate in that, in that manner. And so he continued to operate in that manner.
1:00:28 Pablo Torre? And in Shane Hennan's case, by the way, in his personal case, this stuff kept on happening. According to one DEA report, he traveled cross-country unauthorized with over $10,000 in cash. In 2016, apparently Shane tried two separate times in one instance, acting as his own lawyer. Which would have been a hell of a table read for us to do. To end his official supervised release, which the government denied citing Shane's quote, "non-compliance." Of course, you will not be surprised to learn that he posted yet another video that same day of himself boarding a private jet. And all of this seemed to come crashing down when Shane did get pulled over for that DUI I referenced many moons ago.
1:01:13 Pablo Torre? This was in Missouri, outside of St. Louis in 2017. He had more than the $14,000 I mentioned in cash. And Shane claimed that that money was gambling winnings. His probation officer then had to flag it, but three months after that DUI arrest, he could not help himself.
1:01:34 Pablo Torre? Because he posted this on Instagram.
1:01:37 Speaker 03 Yeah. It's him and Lil Jon.
1:01:41 Pablo Torre? Oh, God.
1:01:43 Speaker 03 And the caption says, "Lil Jon at Jewel nightclub," which I believe is at Aria. "At Alejandro underscore TJ2LV had it lit last night."
1:01:58 Pablo Torre? Notably, Lil Jon, the, you know, worldwide recording artist, has a shirt that I think says, "Fuck you Snapchat" on it. Anyway, all of this brings us back to 2025 now. This is when Shane Hennan got arrested. You will recall in January at the Vegas airport, headed on a one-way flight to Columbia for dental work that I can only imagine would have made Lil Jon proud, as Lil Jon is flashing his own grill in that photo. And what happens, of course, is that Shane Hennan winds up frequenting, after that arrest, the Aria High Limit Bar once again.
1:02:36 Speaker 03 I can't wait to go back to Summer League. I'm gonna go hang out at that bar.
1:02:39 Pablo Torre? Yeah, apparently, like, the Aria High Limit Bar is the Moes Isley Cantina of the professional basketball world.
1:02:46 Speaker 03 A den of scum and villainy.
1:02:48 Pablo Torre? As my poker source that you heard from before can personally attest.
1:02:53 Speaker 07 This summer in Vegas, Shane Hennan is there every day at the Aria, sitting at the Aria Bar, as well as some other casinos, just sitting there hanging out, like, drinking. And the Aria High Limit Bar, if you don't know, is like the place to be when there's a lot going on in Vegas. That's like the social place where everyone's on the networks. And-
1:03:15 Speaker 07 And Shane was there every day. And so a bunch of us were talking like, why would he be here? It makes no sense. Like, why is he just hanging out? You know, during the World Series of Poker and even after that, like every weekend in Vegas at the Oriol Bar, like this guy just got indicted for like a huge crime. Shouldn't he be in jail? And so I started asking around to different people and multiple people put two and two together that Shane is a government informant.
1:03:42 Speaker 03 He's not Joe Pesci. He's Henry Hill. He's Ray Liotta's character in Goodfellas. He's a rat.
1:03:48 Pablo Torre? Allegedly.
1:03:49 Speaker 03 Allegedly.
1:03:50 Pablo Torre? Well, but it is the thing that if you talk to enough people around the poker world, this is their consensus. A half dozen people have relayed this thought to me. And yes, it is recalling that line in Goodfellas, if they are correct, when Ray Liotta, Henry Hill, talks about turning on his crew. He goes, the hardest thing for me was leaving the life. I still love the life. And we were treated like movie stars with muscle. We had it all just for the asking.
1:04:21 Speaker 03 As he told us himself in his Maldives swimming picture. If you're not living the life, what are you doing? They're white ass.
1:04:28 Pablo Torre? And it should be clear, of course, that this theory around Shane Hennan's cooperation with the federal government is for now simply a theory. That's all we're saying. The big question of is the puppet master a rat? Is of course being said in the absence of some official governmental confirmation.
1:04:47 Speaker 03 We're just asking questions.
1:05:02 Pablo Torre? I mean, before I let you go here, um, we do have to get to the question of Shane Hennan's docket. Because we have been tracking Shane's case for three months now. We've been tracking it as his lawyer and the government kept buying time, negotiating this plea agreement. While, by the way, the lawyer for Amar Awade, otherwise known as Moose's cousin, otherwise known as Flappy, was doing the same for him. And on Monday of last week, this is October 20th, 2025, days before the big Thursday presser that blew up the sports world. We did start to hear rumors about Chauncey Billups being involved. We started making calls as a result about Terry Rozier, which is how we happened to
1:05:44 Pablo Torre? break that news on Twitter before Shams Charania and ESPN Thursday morning.
1:05:49 Speaker 05 The games in the New York area were backed by the Bonanno, Gambino, and Genovese crime families of La Casa Nostra. While the cases are separate, there are three overlapping defendants charged in both cases: Damon Jones, Eric Ernest, and Shane Hennan.
1:06:09 Pablo Torre? And I just do need to clarify, I mean, that Damon Jones and Eric Ernest, mentioned there by US Attorney Joe Nacella, have pleaded not guilty to all charges. And I also want to clarify that I have been spending all last week talking to people who have personally prosecuted federal cases much like this one. And there are basically two clubhouse-leading theories that we need to reckon with at the end here. In the first theory, the poker underworld that we heard from is actually onto something. Shane Hennan, the one-time government informant who had been flown around the country by the feds at one point, has been cooperating, once again, with the feds this entire time
1:06:53 Pablo Torre? as a future star witness, feeding the government valuable information, including pictures of the Deckmate 2 shuffler from his iCloud account, in order to save his own ass when it comes to his plea agreement. This is what would explain why, perhaps, he was seemingly moving about the country, sitting courtside watching Terry Rozier cross over Nicholas Batum, and also hanging out, invariably, apparently, at the Aria High Limit area, moving around with de facto diplomatic immunity, allegedly. That's the first theory. But now I want to give you the second theory. Which I find even more poetic in its own right. Because in this second theory, according to my federal prosecutor sources,
1:07:36 Pablo Torre? Shane Hannon is not going to be a star witness for the government, actually. And that would explain why he was named as a defendant in both cases. Because while Shane Hannon has been spending this entire year since he got arrested in January in Vegas, at the airport, negotiating his plea agreement for months and months now, feeding the government that valuable headline-making information along the way, as he's admitted to doing in the past, Shane Hannon may have made a crucial mistake, which is that his behavior while out on bail, chugging the Casamigos, drinking from the glass of a woman who was holding it with her mouth while wearing a hundred-dollar bill-printed swimsuit,
1:08:20 Pablo Torre? that behavior might have actually ruined his credibility as an actual witness in a trial that the government might plausibly call to the stand. Meaning that the government may well have gotten a lot of information from Shane Hannon, who has been historically eager to give that information.
1:08:47 Pablo Torre? But precisely how much remains in question as Shane Hannon might not have gotten the protection that he sought in exchange.
1:08:56 Speaker 03 This might be the worst-case scenario for Shane Hannon. Is that you snitch on the record, you get everyone you were working with in trouble, and you get zero protection or immunity. You get charged yourself. Dare I say, Pablo, he might have to watch out for stitches.
1:09:15 Pablo Torre? Well, his very unprotected white ass might want to, you know, be a bit careful. That would be the implication of theory number two. And as we wait further developments in this docket, there are questions, I mean.
1:09:36 Pablo Torre? And some of the outstanding questions in this enormous NBA nightmare relate to Malik Beasley. Because of course, Malik Beasley, you should know, happened to join the Lakers roster on February 9th, 2023. The same day that Lakers assistant Damon Jones was allegedly texting inside information to quote, "Get a big bet on Milwaukee tonight," to an unidentified co-conspirator number nine, who is described in the indictment only as a resident of Brooklyn.
1:10:15 Pablo Torre? Malik Beasley, you may now recall, is also the player that the cousin of Amar Flappy Awade, a resident of Brooklyn, had been tweeting about months before the federal investigation into Beasley was ever mentioned in public. But months after Amar Flappy Awade had turned himself into the feds, joining the other charter members of that Jontay Porter group chat, only to very curiously not be named as a defendant in the government's NBA betting indictment when it got unsealed last week.
1:10:57 Pablo Torre? Awade, by the way, was fighting the government's opposition to his bail, heading into a hearing this Wednesday. And all of this is to say that multiple sources with direct knowledge tell Pablo Torre finds out that the federal government's investigation into Malik Beasley is still ongoing, two weeks into this NBA season, as Malik Beasley remains a frustrated free agent. Now, when asked about this, a spokesman for the US Attorney's Office here in the Eastern District of New York told us, quote, "No comment."
1:11:31 Pablo Torre? But an official at the NBA league office tells us that Beasley is still also being investigated internally by the league's lawyers for betting activity, despite not finding any "hard evidence" of Beasley altering his performance or communicating with gamblers to tip his performances, when they got their hands on the phone of Malik Beasley, who had, according to sources, previously been investigated by the NBA for bets he'd made on other sports. But the next question I needed to broach here takes us to Washington DC, because members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and members of the Senate Committee on Commerce
1:12:15 Pablo Torre? have written a pair of bipartisan letters demanding accountability from Commissioner Adam Silver. And what congressional sources tell us is that these members will not be satisfied until Adam Silver answers questions in a televised hearing under oath. As Congresswoman Yvette Clark, the Democrat from New York on the House Committee, tells Pablo Torre finds out in a statement, "The recent federal indictments have called into question the integrity of the National Basketball Association. We will uncover the full scale of this scandal. If/when the NBA fails to protect the integrity of the game, Congress will step in to fill that void. We look forward to hearing from Mr. Silver directly."
1:12:59 Pablo Torre? Meanwhile, in another exclusive statement to PTFO, the US Democratic Senator from Hawaii, Ryan Schatz, who sits on the Senate's committee, tells us, "Recent allegations about gambling in the NBA need to be investigated thoroughly. Basketball fans and the broader public deserve to know the extent of this scandal." And that is kind of all we're trying to do on this show as well, you know? Ask the right questions of powerful people, which brings us to one more question that is provoked by a real-life crook who amusingly sounds like Joe Pesci.
1:13:44 Pablo Torre? What kind of case does the Department of Justice actually have against these bold-faced, headline-making names who have become the thing that pops up on the back of the New York Post?
1:13:57 Speaker 03 Hoops, fellas.
1:14:00 Pablo Torre? And speaking of, it's really hard for me to not think of the wise words spoken by a man with an almost remarkable lucidity about how sports betting, much like a federal investigation, really is a long game.
1:14:19 Speaker 01 Everybody keeps saying, "Oh, my gosh, Shane, you won a million dollars on the weekend. You won a million dollars on Sunday." Like, holy [bleep]. So, yeah, it looks like I cashed out a million dollars, but in all reality, I'm only winning, like, 50, 60K for the week.
1:14:37 Speaker 01 So that's why I'm saying, if anybody thinks that sports betting, you gotta just understand there's gonna be highs and there's gonna be lows.
1:14:43 Speaker 03 So this is a low, right?
1:14:46 Pablo Torre? That's correct.
1:14:47 Speaker 03 Oh, callback!
1:14:58 Pablo Torre? This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production.
1:15:04 Pablo Torre? And I'll talk to you next time.
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