Investigating Patient Zero of the NBA Gambling Scandal — and the Mob

Jontay Porter got in too deep, betting millions on sports — and then on himself. But was the face of a federal investigation — and the integrity of the game — played by mafia-linked hustlers? The New Yorker's Nick Berardini teams up with Pablo to fact-check an addiction, scoop up exclusive interviews... and finally question the wise guys. • Read "The Under" https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/11/16/the-nba-player-who-got-hooked-on-sports-betting by Nick Berardini • Subscribe to "The New Yorker Radio Hour" https://pod.link/the-new-yorker-radio-hour • Send your confidential tips https://www.pablo.show/tips to Pablo Previously on PTFO: • Part 1: Moose, the Money and a Garbage-Time God https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/OTUyZTViNmUtODRkZC0xMWYwLWFjNDUtYWY0N2M5MTk2ZDUy • Part 2: Hoopfellas https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/NjkwMmNmOGYwNzZhNDAyZWUyNDVkMWM3 • Part 3: Co-Conspirator 1 https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/NjlhMGI3YzIwZTMwOTU1ODUxY2Y0NmQ1 • Plus: We Unraveled the Case of the Mob Hit That Saved Vegas https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/NjljZGM1ODNhMTdmMTU2Nzk5NTEwNzI3 If you or someone you know needs help with problem gambling, call or text the National Problem Gambling Helpline at 1-800-MY-RESET or click here https://www.ncpgambling.org/help-treatment/ for additional resources. If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or click here https://speakingofsuicide.com/resources/ for additional resources. (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 The New Yorker and do not reflect the work or editorial input of The Athletic or its journalists.) (Pablo Torre Finds Out is brought to you by Apple Card.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Pablo Torre?

  Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out, brought to you by Apple Card. I am Pablo Torre, and today, we're gonna find out what this sound is.

• 0:08Speaker 01

  If I didn't lose my NBA job, I would've lost my wife, and I would've lost my family's support. I might've even lost my life.

• 0:14Pablo Torre?

  Right after this. This episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out is brought to you by McDonald's. The Quarter Pounder with Cheese with Medium Fries and a Drink is now $8. And look, I've chased down a lot of strange stories, but nothing quite like what's inside a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. It is 100% fresh beef, cooked right when you order it, with no artificial flavors, colors, fillers, or preservatives in the beef. The onions are hand-topped by someone who knows the perfect amount by memory, two slices of cheese and a star, and two pickles side by side. So every bite gets both. And every time one's ordered, a cowbell sound rings in the kitchen. That's the grill master's cue to put a fresh patty on the grill. My move?

• 0:57Pablo Torre?

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• 1:42Pablo Torre?

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• 2:25Pablo Torre?

  That's dell.com/deals.

• 2:31Pablo Torre?

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• 3:15Pablo Torre?

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• 3:40Pablo Torre?

  It is rare, I just gotta say this, Nick, that I come across someone whose work does help explain this topic that I've been obsessed with, that we've been investigating on this show,

• 3:50Pablo Torre?

  but also sort of explains my personal frustrations in trying to get to the bottom of it. So Nick Berardini, thank you for finally coming clean with us here.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  Oh my gosh, well, if I'm coming clean, then there's a lot more dirt still left to go, which is maybe scary in and of itself.

• 4:08Pablo Torre?

  There is a lot of dirt in this episode we're about to do together, in part because we've been covering here on the show the NBA's gambling scandal, the ongoing federal investigation into a nationwide network of mafia-linked hustlers. In our first episode, for those who are unfamiliar, in July of 2025, it focused on a guy named Amar Awad. This is a Brooklyn deli owner turned sort of a modern-day bookie that we can see here, eating fast food in a red hoodie in a photo that we've shown before. And we also kept on spotting Amar in the courtroom and also courtside at Knicks games. And while Amar declined to talk to us through his attorney, we went to extreme lengths, Nick, to even track down and interview

• 4:53Pablo Torre?

  this kid who turned out to be his cousin, who had been accurately tweeting slash predicting which NBA players, like Malik Beasley, noted shooting guard, might get arrested by the Feds.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  Tweet from @freemoso_nba. First was Jontay, then was Rozier. Next, you'll hear about "M" redacted, "B" redacted.

• 5:17Pablo Torre?

  And as I have been obsessed with this family tree and this coaching tree of characters, what I myself did not predict, until I heard from the august New Yorker magazine last week, was that I would get scooped in this same ongoing story by a different shooting guard of note.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  A shooting guard is a very, very generous way to put it. More like sitting guard, I would say, instead of shooting guard, but sure.

• 5:46Pablo Torre?

  How many total points did you score at the University of Missouri?

• 5:48Speaker 01

  Are we counting only regular season games? I think 13. If we count exhibition games, I think I fired a bunch against Lithuania Academy my junior year. But if we're only counting official NCAA stats, I think 13.

• 6:00Pablo Torre?

  Well, could you describe what we're showing everybody visually?

• 6:03Speaker 01

  That is former, longtime pro Damari Carroll.

• 6:06Pablo Torre?

  Oh, that's Damari Carroll that you're...

• 6:08Speaker 01

  That's Damari Carroll.

• 6:08Pablo Torre?

  What are you doing to him?

• 6:09Speaker 01

  I'm doing my patented run-up off the bench after he scores a basket during a run where the other team calls timeout. Luckily, no one ever got hurt in the making of many of those mugging photos that I did to many of my teammates over the years.

• 6:24Pablo Torre?

  It's almost like an air hump. You're kind of, you have remarkable, a remarkable vertical, despite appearances.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  It was quite shocking, the amount of work it took to be able to actually have a 32-inch or something, 33-inch vertical leap as a 6'1" walk-on.

• 6:41Pablo Torre?

  It's a lot of energy, we should also say, for a guy whose official scouting report on mutigers.com is as follows.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  Great character walk-on that has earned his teammates respect for his work ethic both in practice and in the classroom will be the first Mizzou basketball player to graduate with a degree in broadcast journalism.

• 7:00Pablo Torre?

  And this brings us to the other Mizzou basketball player, the other character we've been covering here on the show, who happens to be the public catalyst, the patient zero arguably, for the thing that we've been reporting on, you and me, which is, yeah, the foremost gambling scandal in American sports.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  The NBA has banned Toronto Raptors player Jontay Porter for life.

• 7:25Speaker 03

  The NBA says Porter committed several serious violations that include betting on games, providing confidential information to bettors, and worst, limiting his own participation in games.

• 7:37Speaker 04

  Jontay Porter has pleaded guilty in a case tied to a massive NBA betting scandal.

• 7:43Speaker 05

  This is the insider trading saga for the NBA.

• 7:46Speaker 06

  FBI Director Cash Patel announced more than 30 arrests in what he called "a wide-sweeping criminal enterprise" that envelops both the NBA and La Cosa Nostra.

• 7:55Speaker 05

  And when these two collided together, they perpetrated a fraud that is historic in terms of not just money, but the scheme and the deceit.

• 8:05Speaker 06

  Pablo Torre is the reporter who broke the news in the indictments today. He's been investigating this story on his podcast, Pablo Torre Finds Out.

• 8:12Pablo Torre?

  We hear Pablo Torre Finds Out had been talking earlier this year with Jontay Porter's representatives about an exclusive interview. That's what we were really hoping for. And ultimately, they said no. But you, on the other hand, Nick, how long have you been talking to Jontay Porter personally at this point?

• 8:32Speaker 01

  Personally, I've known him going back to his days with Michael as a basketball player at the University of Missouri.

• 8:39Pablo Torre?

  His brother, Michael.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  His brother, Michael Porter Jr., yes. They both played their freshman seasons at the University of Missouri. And I had started a film project around that same time, following them and got to know them that way. And when Michael got hurt, that film project kind of died. But Jontay and I basically developed a rapport because I liked Michael a lot, but he was just a traditional kind of superstar. And he would tell you openly, "I'm gonna be the best player who ever lived," and he had evidence to support it. And Jontay would tell you about the restaurant he wanted to open one day, or he was getting into Tesla, or he was thinking about things that most 17-year-old, 18-year-old star athletes don't think about. And so when the scandal broke, it's like an out-of-body experience for me because the guy I know is more likely to play mahjong than be mixed up in the mafia.

• 9:24Pablo Torre?

  You had a connection, this is the guy, and he was national news.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  I gave him a lot of space, obviously, when this happened. But probably about a year after all the news broke, he was living in Columbia, Missouri, and that's where I live too. And we just reconnected and I kind of said to him, you know, you're gonna have to figure out how you want to come back into the world one day. And probably the best way to do that is in this venerable magazine, where you get 11,000 words to kind of give the full scope of your story and what happened. And that became a really long and unbearably long, I mean, impossibly long process of starting these conversations that then led to all the on the record interviews that then, you know, built this piece. I was terrified every single week that you were gonna discover the fitness influencer

• 10:15Speaker 01

  or you were gonna find the things that we're gonna talk about. I was just gonna be like, Pablo, please don't do this to me. Let me, let me have this one.

• 10:22Pablo Torre?

  So it's really rare to get the access that you got, plus the vetting from a magazine like The New Yorker, plus a bunch of stuff that's not even mentioned in your print piece that relates to the other guy who refused to talk to us in this whole process, Amar Awade.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  So, you know, I'm at this McDonald's playing with my kids and your episode on Moose had just aired the day before. And all of a sudden I get a phone call while I'm basically about to wipe my kindergartner boy's butt because he has to take a [BLEEP]. And it turns out to be Amar Awade on the other line.

• 10:59Pablo Torre?

  You're on assignment for The New Yorker and wiping your kid's ass.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  Listen, I'm wiping my kid's ass and I'm thinking of you.

• 11:11Pablo Torre?

  And what does the guy that we had been chasing, this mob-licked character, what does he tell you about us?

• 11:19Speaker 01

  He tells me that you're talking about a bunch of nonsense.

• 11:22Pablo Torre?

  I didn't expect to be so jealous of a conversation in which I was being [BLEEP] talked to a guy who was handling literal [BLEEP].

• 11:52Pablo Torre?

  So Nick, I do want to begin by confessing a bit of my ignorance here as you are the world's number one Jontay Porter expert, which is that a lot of my prior understanding of this 26-year-old came from the fact that a few days before he got banned for life by the NBA in April of 2024, he had just texted Amar Awade in their now infamous Telegram group chat that those guys, quote, "might just get hit with a Rico," end quote, which is, I think, like a Drake lyric. But I read your work and I talk to you and I just have to establish that Jontay Porter is not that simple.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that is one of the things that actually struck me right away and why I say when the scandal broke, it made no sense to me. Because the guy that I knew was introspective and thoughtful and mature and seemed like in a family that had sort of always been primed to be stars. All eight kids in this family have all gotten basketball scholarships.

• 12:52Pablo Torre?

  Which is crazy.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  Their parents played college basketball. Michael, since the time he was 11, believed he was gonna play in the NBA. And so Jontay had this self-awareness about him that I had picked up on when he was younger that really made it so shocking to think, how does this guy end up with these goofballs and this crime and these things that are happening? And that's what really became the impetus for understanding the broader spectrum of the story, which is about the legal betting space, about addiction, about the world that we're living in of any time, any place gambling. And I think Jontay was also trying to reckon with that.

• 13:28Pablo Torre?

  Well, if you were to just sort of explain the trajectory of his interest in money and finance, where do you start?

• 13:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, the family, there's eight kids. Two parents who were, the mom homeschooled them. You know, their father worked in Christian ministry until he got into coaching. Was they were very, you know, these are very middle, middle-class people with eight kids. And money was tight in a family of 10. And so Jontay kind of very early on told me he developed this fixation about wanting to control his circumstances. He starts by, in seventh grade, like a side hustle fixing iPhone screens. And as a high schooler, he's taking his parents' driver's license, his mom's driver's license to create a Coinbase account because he's like a true believer on Bitcoin. When it's like at, you know, whatever, 200 bucks a Bitcoin and it soars to 20,000. And he's like, see, I'm right.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  And so he developed this pathology about his own intellect and his own ability to kind of outsmart and outmaneuver markets in a way that, as he called it, could make him NBA FU money without actually needing the basketball part of it to make the money.

• 14:35Pablo Torre?

  Right, and it goes from Coinbase to day trading meme stocks on Robinhood, to selling stock tips on Discord, to, you report, playing blackjack on offshore sites. And just to stop here for a second, meme stocks, Discord, day trading, online gambling, sports betting. You write that he started sports betting on FanDuel by the time he turns 21. This trajectory is a familiar pattern among American dudes.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:07Pablo Torre?

  One difference here might be that Jontay Porter, an undrafted rookie on the Grizzlies, had made $4.7 million before getting cut in July of 2021. So the sports betting thing, one of the first big bets that Jontay tells you about on FanDuel took place when?

• 15:25Speaker 01

  In September of 2021. His favorite team in the world is the Kansas City Chiefs. And he's gonna lay this massive bet down on the Chiefs chasing that high of thinking like, I know better.

• 15:39Pablo Torre?

  He puts $125,000 down on the Chiefs to beat the Ravens. And he also lays $10,000 on a three-way parlay, the three legs of which are Chiefs win, the Chiefs' running back hits a certain number of yards, and Lamar Jackson rushing touchdown. And that game, I remember.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  It was a classic, as the gamblers call, bad beat.

• 16:07Pablo Torre?

  Lamar Jackson, in the fourth quarter, deciding to keep it himself.

• 16:17Pablo Torre?

  Touchdown. Lamar Jackson rushing touchdown. And the Chiefs are still at this point on pace to win up five, which is exactly what he needs as well. And there's another angle on this that we should see here from an artifact that I did not know about until your reporting, which is one of Jontay's friends' social media accounts in which we see what?

• 16:36Speaker 01

  As he's watching Lamar Jackson go score.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  He believes he's just won several hundred thousand dollars because all the Chiefs need to do at this point is hold on and win the game.

• 16:51Pablo Torre?

  But then, Nick, the Ravens famously take the lead. And as the Chiefs are trying, scrambling to set up the game-winning field goal, the ball is out.

• 17:05Pablo Torre?

  There's a fumble.

• 17:10Pablo Torre?

  And this is how the Chiefs lose and this is how Jontay's parlay collapses. So when you finally sit down with him on camera, on the record, again, this guy who I've been trying to hear from. Everyone's been curious, like, what is his actual interiority like? What did Jontay Porter tell you about that bet and what it made him feel?

• 17:34Speaker 01

  He has this rush of believing he's just won hundreds of thousands of dollars on this football game. It's taken away from him. He goes into his room, he's inconsolable, he's staring at the ceiling. He's just like, how could I be so reckless?

• 17:49Speaker 07

  That was my first big loss that just wrecked me. And then I deleted the app, like suspended my account that night. And then the next morning, I was mad. I came back for vengeance.

• 18:00Pablo Torre?

  And so the most remarkable information of all of it, baby, that you were able to get wasn't even the testimony from Jontay Porter. For anyone who's wondering, you know, is this a Mizzou thing? Is Nick just really empathetic towards this guy that he's known for a while? Because you get access to his FanDuel transaction history.

• 18:19Speaker 01

  And that was one of the first things I asked him to do is get your transaction history. Let's go through it together. And I'm seeing this and he had always talked about this Chiefs bet, like it's this big crossroads, this is his first big bet I'm making. So I start going through his records and I get it all organized. And I realize in that first weekend, between the first day he starts betting and that Chiefs game, it's about three days. I text him, you made 144 bets for $1,278,111 between 9:16 and 9:19, the day of the Chiefs game, and no one says, hey, man, you good, lol? Like, that really jaw-dropped me.

• 18:58Pablo Torre?

  It's staggering. And what Jontay says in response in text messages is, OMG, four exclamation points, no way, two crying laughing emojis. I don't even remember betting that many times back then, lol. I must have been glued to the screen, basically 50 bets a day, when I didn't even think I was betting that much.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:18Pablo Torre?

  End quote. And so this is also you not merely being like human spreadsheet, but you're also like fact-checking his addiction.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:31Speaker 07

  Just that like suspension where your whole outcome is in question. Eyes, bloodshot, staring at a screen. Your head's about to explode and you win and it's like, great, I can keep going now. And it feels really good for a second, but you want that feeling again.

• 19:47Pablo Torre?

  Well, let's now look at the folder of receipts here because I want to walk through what Jontay Porter was betting on.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  So I'm going through it on September 26th, 2021 at 11:23 PM Mountain Time. Edward Zvetkov, $32,000 to win $41,142.

• 20:07Pablo Torre?

  A win, by the way, on FanDuel.

• 20:09Speaker 01

  A win on FanDuel, then another win on FanDuel. Edward Zvetkov, again, three minutes later, $66,000 to win $69,300. Three nights later, 12:47 AM, same guy, $180,000.

• 20:26Pablo Torre?

  And this is 240,000 more dollars to Jontay's account.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, and now God bless you if you can pronounce this name, but I have no idea. Aleksandr Vasiliyevich Varoshevichin, $90,000.

• 20:39Pablo Torre?

  However, you pronounce that dude won more than $137,000 because of it.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  This was all at 2 o'clock in the morning, so eight minutes later, after that bet, another $74,000 on Aleksandr Varoshevichin.

• 20:53Pablo Torre?

  Another $80,000 won by Jontay Porter on FanDuel.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  2:36 AM, $90,000. Valery Vichislavovich Koutin.

• 21:05Pablo Torre?

  It's worth pointing out that I had never heard of a single one of these people before. Who are they?

• 21:12Speaker 01

  These are all Russian table tennis players, which jaw dropped me because I didn't know you could bet on Russian table tennis on these legal sports betting apps.

• 21:22Pablo Torre?

  And it gets us to not just the full on throes of gambling addiction for Jontay Porter, but his VIP account manager from FanDuel. Because this VIP host tells you what about where Jontay, on the back of all this money, is ranking on the platform?

• 21:42Speaker 01

  One week when he was on FanDuel and he bet more than $30 million this week, he was the top player on the entire FanDuel network in the entire country.

• 21:51Pablo Torre?

  What does therefore this VIP account manager do as he's seeing this unfold in his own spreadsheet?

• 21:59Speaker 01

  This VIP account manager says to me, he's poring through all this data, looking for big betters. That's his job. And he goes, holy shit, a guy that's betting that much on basically everything. This guy doesn't have some edge on us. This is just a hardcore gambler and his job is to basically reward the hardcore gambler, not in this way of trying to ruin his life, but in a way of saying, hey, if you're going to bet 30 mil on Russian ping pong, you're going to lose, let's keep you loyal to us. Here's some free credit to keep betting on FanDuel and not take your money and go to DraftKings or something.

• 22:34Pablo Torre?

  And how much money does he give in credits?

• 22:36Speaker 01

  So that was one of the most fascinating parts. The first night he gives him $10,000. Jontay, the next night, asks for another $10,000. The VIP account manager decides to go over his discretionary limit to bonus him again, realizing the guy is winning right now, but he's going to give us the money back. And that's exactly what happens. The next day, he loses about $600,000 on the platform. And this VIP manager's bosses, who had been mad at him for going over his limit and bonusing Jontay while winning, actually basically kind of go off into their corner, say nothing, and they give him another $35,000 in credit to gamble.

• 23:15Pablo Torre?

  So it's important to know that this is based on extensive information that you got from the account manager in question. And also that in a statement to The New Yorker, FanDuel acknowledged making, quote, "significant changes since Jontay's time in this VIP program, including, quote, 'additional employee training and, quote, proactive account reviews when concerning play patterns are detected,' end quote." But if this VIP account manager is on one shoulder urging Jontay Porter to just like, yeah, dude, stay at it.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  Keep ripping.

• 23:47Pablo Torre?

  Keep it going. Who's the person on the other shoulder, so to speak? Who's the other person of influence here in his life?

• 23:56Speaker 01

  His girlfriend, this very, very serious relationship, who happens to be a financial advisor.

• 24:02Pablo Torre?

  Which is just one of those details where you're like, again, in the script, they'd be like, this is a bit much.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  It was very on the nose.

• 24:08Pablo Torre?

  And what is her knowledge of what Jontay is doing?

• 24:11Speaker 01

  Jontay has convinced her that actually what he's been doing all this time is still day trading and kind of being interested in markets. And so he has told her essentially he's winning this money and he's trading commodities futures essentially, which does raise a red flag for her, but also like seems plausible enough because Jontay's this bashful guy. He's not the kind of guy you think about like holed up in his brother's penthouse betting on Russian ping pong in the middle of the night.

• 24:39Pablo Torre?

  Right, gambling away the $500,000 loan apparently that they had taken out against his house.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  That was one of the darker things that he told me was that Jontay had bought a house in Memphis in cash when he made the Grizzlies, then took a $500,000 basically home equity line of credit out on that house, lost it all gambling and decided to sell his house. And his girlfriend is thinking, we're going to net this profit from this house. You're going to sell, use it to build a little nest egg. Jontay's panicking, which is really what kicks off this ping pong binge that he's on. He gets in his Tesla, he puts it on autopilot. He drives from Memphis to his parents' house, going to an offshore casino site to play blackjack on his phone and loses another $200,000 between Memphis and Columbia, Missouri.

• 25:26Pablo Torre?

  And so as we follow Jontay's path through the world, how does he wind up on, again, this now infamous Telegram group chat? Because the characters, the shady characters that we have come to know on this show through the NBA gambling scandal, what's his gateway into that part of the map?

• 25:46Speaker 01

  So after roughly 15 months of firing on FanDuel, he gets to a point where he bets over $50 million on FanDuel alone in roughly an 18 month period. He's more or less out of his own money and he's addicted to gambling. So what does he do? He goes to the people who will let you bet on credit.

• 26:06Pablo Torre?

  One of the characters we did not get to know in our reporting is apparently a fitness influencer who has not been charged in connection with the case, which is why he never came up in our survey of this landscape. But what does this fitness influencer purport to help with?

• 26:25Speaker 01

  Well, he meets Jontay through this Discord channel that Jontay was a part of where they were talking about stock trades and things. And through this connection, through this relationship, Jontay knows this is a New York guy and he just out of the blue kind of asks him, hey, do you know any bookies who will let me bet on credit? One of them happens to be this guy Murray, who is purportedly from a group that he referred to as the Jews. Jontay interpreted as the Jewish mafia.

• 26:52Pablo Torre?

  And so as Jontay Porter is losing more than $160,000 in two weeks in 2022, I just want to provide some text messages here from this fitness influencer, who is warning Jontay, Nick, the following.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  Tay, do you think I'm joking when I say these are the worst people? These are the type of people who hack your computer, fill it with kid porn and alert the police.

• 27:17Pablo Torre?

  And it turns out that this influencer then tries to help, he tells Jontay, by paying off some of his debt to the aforementioned Murray by selling two watches as collateral?

• 27:28Speaker 01

  Yes, big jewelry guy and he sold like a iced out presidential Rolex and a chandelier AP.

• 27:35Pablo Torre?

  And so this is where we also say that the fitness influencer in question did not respond to your multiple requests for comment.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  Many requests for comment, yeah.

• 27:41Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, but all this is scary shit, man.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:44Pablo Torre?

  And Jontay, meanwhile, at some point here realizes, man, I should try to make it back to the NBA. And he starts gambling to speed run through some of this with the credit cards of his now wife, who is again, a financial advisor while she's asleep in bed. His family, the many siblings and his parents, including Michael Porter Jr., there's an intervention. And Michael pays for rehab. But one wrinkle to this presumed intervention is that this fitness influencer also apparently connects Jontay Porter with someone else in addition to the Jewish mafia by the name of who?

• 28:24Speaker 01

  Amar Wada.

• 28:27Pablo Torre?

  And this is where our timelines again intersect. Because Amar, we've been trying to get access to him throughout our coverage of this scandal, which is very much, it turns out, about access. And we found him across the map. This 35 year old Brooklyn bodega owner slash pseudo bookie slash diehard Knicks fan, who had allegedly, according to court documents and news reports, scammed a woman who had been run over by a subway, allegedly stealing her $800,000 in settlement money and spending it on a bachelor party and honeymoon. Although Amar denied that he still got that much in this case that was eventually dismissed. But he did admit that 80 grand did wind up in his personal account.

• 29:11Pablo Torre?

  All of which is to say that this is also a kind of like cinematic sort of figure.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  It's a Scorsese plot mixed with Spike Lee, which was the funniest part because he also apparently told me he owned courtside seats at Knicks games right next to Spike Lee.

• 29:25Pablo Torre?

  We did happen to see his Facebook profile banner. This was a year and a half ago and it was literally Amar dapping up Carmelo Anthony courtside at MSG at a Knicks game. And so that part of the story, actually according to our reporting, quite plausible. When you combine this with the fact that my sources have been telling me in the underground poker world, this is the same guy Amar who's been, you know, organizing these card games, which you also found out, these poker games that may have included Leonardo DiCaprio, Paul Pierce, and also may have taken place at a house once rented by?

• 30:03Speaker 01

  LeBron James.

• 30:05Pablo Torre?

  Although LeBron's spokesperson denied to The New Yorker that he had rented the house and Leo's rep declined to comment to you guys and Paul Pierce did not respond to requests for comment. This is the social network of the NBA in so many words.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:19Pablo Torre?

  And Amar's legal team was declining our request for comment. We heard from a spokesperson who ultimately did not offer a comment on the record either.

• 30:32Pablo Torre?

  Well, now we're back at that McDonald's in Columbia, Missouri, the day after episode one of our series comes out.

• 30:40Speaker 01

  And simultaneously, just coincidentally, as that was happening, I'd been emailing Amar's lawyers about trying to talk to him. And I get a phone call from a 347 phone number. And my kids are like climbing on my back and their one friend is like kicking a Happy Meal box across the play place and they're playing soccer. And I'm like, hello? And on the other end, I was like, hey, what's up, man? And I was like, who the hell is this? Like, what do you, what do you mean? He goes, this is Amar.

• 31:09Pablo Torre?

  There is a quote that you've shared with us here from that call at the McDonald's. This is not in the New Yorker story. And I just want to read it here because Amar tells you, quote, "I want people to know that I'm not the [bleep] villain, the way the internet has portrayed me. I'm not a monster." End quote. And so what was his sort of beef in particular with our, you know, hour-long episode that we had published, such that it was a bunch of nonsense to him?

• 31:40Speaker 01

  I think at the time, his perspective was also this was before the poker indictments had come out. And there had just been this famous poker forum where people were accusing him of cheating in all these poker games and that that thread blew up. And he had felt the angst of all of this weighing down on him. I think it was more a defense mechanism to say, oh, that's just a bunch of nonsense. And he even said, what, I'm not allowed to go to a Knicks game? To which I laughed and I did think, yeah, of course you're allowed to go to a Knicks game. Sure.

• 32:07Pablo Torre?

  And you do call him back.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And, you know, we developed that relationship over the course of a year where I was very clear with him, you know, hey, if you need to tell me something off the record, or if you can't talk to me, you say, I cannot talk to you about that. And he had always maintained that once I plead guilty to these cases, I don't really care what happens because it was very clear to me from the beginning, he was going to plead guilty. And what I discovered in kind of, again, dealing with him was that it was a more complicated story than who's the villain. Jontay's committed serious crimes, Amar's committed serious crimes, right? All these other characters have allegedly committed serious crimes. But if they're all crimes that are fueled by these addictions that they have, that

• 32:53Speaker 01

  really changes the context of how you think about their actions, not because you want to let them off the hook, but because you can understand the desperation of the addict who's really just trying to do anything possible to get out of these holes they've dug for themselves and they're all running game on each other.

• 33:19Pablo Torre?

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• 34:22Speaker 04

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• 35:06Pablo Torre?

  So I want to set us now in January of 2024 because Jontay Porter's family, at this point, thinks he's clean post-intervention, but just in reality, how in debt is he at this point?

• 35:18Speaker 01

  It's impossible to know for sure, but according to him, at least seven figures to various different peoples, including his own brother at times, who had, you know, like paid for the rehab and stuff. He's probably seven figures in debt.

• 35:29Pablo Torre?

  Right. And he's dealing with the fitness influencer guy and that guy Murray from the apparent Jewish mafia who had sold those watches to cover his debt. And another five-figure loan to a guy from rehab. And I guess what I'm saying is, if you're this in the hole, and truly impressively, making your way back to the NBA simultaneously, we should point out that this story does bring us back to a familiar area code. Turnovers be devil in the Knicks and another one. Porter with the steal as Brunson's pass deflected. And so here is Jontay Porter, Toronto Raptor, right? He's playing against the Knicks at the Garden. He scores six points in 21 minutes.

• 36:13Pablo Torre?

  He's on his way to getting his two-way bench contract converted into a full-time deal. But here in New York, on this road trip, he is also on the way to meeting who?

• 36:22Speaker 01

  Meeting Amar Awada for dinner.

• 36:25Pablo Torre?

  And where do they go?

• 36:26Speaker 01

  It's an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn, but they can't remember which one.

• 36:29Pablo Torre?

  How many times have they met in person?

• 36:31Speaker 01

  This was the first and only time they ever met in person.

• 36:34Pablo Torre?

  And so I guess now, since Amar rejects, you know, our reporting here, how does he describe himself? What's his own self-description?

• 36:43Speaker 01

  Amar tells me, you know, I don't work for nobody. I'm my own boss. It's more like a middleman.

• 36:49Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  So he's kind of, yes, like a bookie, but really what he's doing is apparently helping facilitate these bets with other bookies, essentially.

• 36:58Pablo Torre?

  And so if you were to simplify it as to what Jontay understood, Amar is a middleman for whom?

• 37:07Speaker 01

  For serious guys. Jontay, at this stage, obviously is getting inundated with text messages every day from all these various parties. The guy at rehab was later murdered in an unrelated case. I mean, it's these kind of characters who are texting him.

• 37:22Pablo Torre?

  A while.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  And he decides at some point, I have to get out of this. I have to find a way out. And he can't go back to Michael because he's afraid at this point that if he goes to his NBA superstar brother who finds out he's still been gambling and still in all this debt, their relationship is going to be fractured, right? So Amar, according to Jontay, and largely according to what the prosecutors have said in court documents, presents this idea at this dinner that now you're back in the NBA, you can do what's called a special. You can fake an injury or illness, we'll put some bets down against your stats in a game. Amar's version of this dinner is Jontay presents this idea that, well, if I do a

• 38:04Speaker 01

  "special," quote unquote, if I rig these prop bets, you guys get your cut, you know, I'll get my cut, we'll all leave each other alone and I could start fresh, basically.

• 38:14Pablo Torre?

  The special is a euphemism for, we have a professional athlete who is in debt. And they realize, in the era of legalized sports gambling, there is a massive menu of bets, almost infinite, it seems, in which even an obscure guy like Jontay Porter has these bettable subcategories in every single game. And so this prop bet, you can just underperform it.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  One of the contradictions of the legal betting space is the idea that if you're a bookie, you're going to take an $80,000 parlay or something on Jontay Porter, you're going to be like, get the [bleep] out of here, man. Why are you trying to rob me?

• 38:57Pablo Torre?

  Exactly.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  But if you're FanDuel, you can accept these bets because, hey, maybe it's, if it's on the up and up, we'll just keep the money. Fine. If it's not, we'll call law enforcement.

• 39:05Pablo Torre?

  And so how do, given the oversight of the legal gambling operators, how do Amar and Jontay and this group chat, how do they try to avoid that very concern?

• 39:19Speaker 01

  Well, Amar is smart enough to understand everybody is watching, these regulators are watching. And his belief is, we're going to spread this out over multiple sportsbooks. We're going to use potentially offshore sportsbooks as well. And he says, stay under the radar and the platforms won't [bleep] cry.

• 39:38Pablo Torre?

  In other words, like, stay low to the ground and you can avoid the detection systems?

• 39:42Speaker 01

  Couple thousand here, couple thousand there, different sportsbooks, use VIP accounts because those are the guys who are betting on wild [bleep] all the time anyway. So it's not that suspicious if they're all of a sudden deciding to fire Jontay Porter unders and you could probably get away with it.

• 39:58Pablo Torre?

  And the reason they think this scheme would work, Nick, is because why?

• 40:04Speaker 01

  Because Awada's partner from the poker world had already participated in a similar scheme with Terry Rozier.

• 40:11Pablo Torre?

  Allegedly. And this is another thing that we've explored on this show before, as Rozier and his attorney, by the way, for the record, deny this and Rozier has pled not guilty and is now heading towards trial. But in this case, there was another fun detail, which is that Jontay Porter, conveniently, I guess, was poked in the eye.

• 40:34Speaker 01

  What Jontay told me was he had sort of decided he was gonna do this. But in order for him to help his guilty conscience, he had been poked in the eye in the previous game and he was like, well, am I really lying if I take myself out by saying that my eye is bothering me? So that's what kind of becomes his justification in his integrity mind to say, was it truly cheating if I just blame it on an injury I got from the last game?

• 41:01Pablo Torre?

  And it all takes us to January 26th, 2024, because the Toronto Raptors are hosting the Los Angeles Clippers. And now we find ourselves inside the group chat. This is the notorious group chat on Telegram in which Jontay, according to unsealed court documents, texts Amar and his gambler friends on Telegram before the game the following.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  Hit unders for the big numbers. I told Amar, it says co-conspirator too, but that's Amar, no blocks, no steals. I'm going to play the first two, three minute stint off the bench and then when I get subbed out, tell them my eye killing me again.

• 41:39Pablo Torre?

  And you can see as we show some of this on YouTube and Apple Podcasts, that after Jontay Porter plays just four minutes in the first quarter, the buzzer sounds and there he goes right to the bench and he's pointing towards where?

• 41:54Speaker 01

  He's pointing to his left eye.

• 41:56Pablo Torre?

  Having talked to Jontay, how did he feel in that moment as he's reliving it?

• 42:02Speaker 01

  He tells me that he felt just an overwhelming amount of shame. And the tragedy of that game is he had spent years getting back to the NBA and his mother had not seen him play back in the NBA yet and she-

• 42:16Pablo Torre?

  Was at that game?

• 42:17Speaker 01

  Was at that game. And so he's getting his eye checked out with his wife and his mom and kind of the reality of what he's just done has hit him.

• 42:27Pablo Torre?

  Well, to make matters worse, to add insult to fake injury, what happens in terms of the windfall here that Amar and Jontay and the group chat had planned?

• 42:40Speaker 01

  Well, the problem was that because of Amar's plan to try to spread it out across multiple books and bet small, they don't bet nearly enough or win nearly enough to clear Jontay's debt. Now, this is allegedly what the story is, that they don't actually get enough down to pay off his debt. There's a possibility to me that that was an excuse to potentially keep him, you know, on the hook. And I don't think it's fair to say we know that definitively, but it is a possibility that the idea they didn't get enough down was a way to continue to keep pressure on him.

• 43:17Pablo Torre?

  But I want to now see it from Jontay's perspective now in hindsight as he's walking back through his life with you, because who is the guy that Jontay Porter is told he now owes money to?

• 43:30Speaker 01

  Well, Jontay is kind of [BLEEP] because Jontay owes Vinny.

• 43:34Pablo Torre?

  And who the [BLEEP] is Vinny?

• 43:37Speaker 01

  So, according to what kind of Jontay told me, Amar and his partner from the poker world, who are the ones kind of facilitating these, this plan with Jontay, tell him, you cannot [BLEEP] with this Vinny guy. This guy like just got out of prison for manslaughter. He one time cut a gambler's finger off for not paying a debt. To be fair, Amar, in talking to him about this, completely denies that Jontay was ever threatened physically by anybody connected to him. But the idea of this character Vinny is that he was not somebody you would cross.

• 44:11Pablo Torre?

  We're now in March of 24. He's playing his brother, Michael, his intervention sponsor, and that same night, Jontay Porter finds out what?

• 44:23Speaker 01

  That his wife is pregnant.

• 44:25Pablo Torre?

  And so as all of this is colliding on March 20th, I do now want to consider this series of texts that Jontay receives from Vinny about this outstanding debt.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  We need to get this issue resolved. Jontay writes back, he told you last night he got you. So this is Amar saying that he's gonna make the payment for Jontay. Vinny, again, have him contact me now, please. And then Jontay also receives all these texts from a enforcer for Vinny, this guy that is purportedly named Sal.

• 45:01Pablo Torre?

  What does Sal tell him?

• 45:03Speaker 01

  Sal says, get Amar to contact us. We need to have a sit down, which in our goodfellas canon would tell you, sit down in the mafia world is a very serious thing.

• 45:14Pablo Torre?

  And so as we get deeper into La Cosa Nostra and the Italian mob as presented, I do want to outsource what happens next to a guy named at Mike underscore Daddino, because this account, he was watching the March 20th, 2024 game between the Sacramento Kings and Jontay Porter's Toronto Raptors. This is the same day as the texts that you just read from Vinny and Sal. And here is Mr. Daddino's color commentary as he's watching television.

• 45:43Speaker 03

  So Mr. Porter, he's really only playing in this game because the Raptors, they're super shorthanded tonight. And G. Galle, he kind of comes out playing his [BLEEP] off. Look at him body up Sabonis, putting the yams on him, boxing him out, doing the little things. So then this is where it gets odd. Not Tierra and Fox hitting a three. We know that's very odd, but with 11:23 left in the second quarter, keep your eye on the scorer's table here. That's Jontay Porter. He's set to come back into the game and he's going to have, we're gonna stay here, he's going to have a little conversation with his coach here at the scorer's table.

• 46:24Speaker 03

  Fast forward another 20 seconds or so, now he's still here and Grady Dick, Mr. Dick, joins him on the scorer's table. Now we come back from the commercial and Jontay Porter is not in the game, but Grady Dick is in the game. And Mr. Porter, not on the scorer's table anymore. He's not on the bench anymore either. He is nowhere to be found and that's it.

• 46:48Pablo Torre?

  In other words, Jontay Porter and this allegedly scammy deli owner slash mob linked middleman, Amar Awade, and their Telegram group chat full of gamblers and the overarching specter of these mob characters, the group chat seen eating fast food at the casino that we've shown in this photo before on the day of this game, the Raptors game in question. We saw this, by the way, thanks to in part the federal indictment, because what happens is that Jontay Porter did get caught in this second attempt, this second botched attempt at taking effectively a dive in 2024.

• 47:32Pablo Torre?

  DraftKings flags the activity, which is in retrospect insanely obvious, clearly suspicious, because why is there all of this action on Jontay Porter, this incredibly obscure bench former for the Raptors? And none of it to those regulators adds up.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 47:50Pablo Torre?

  And so then weeks after that March 2024 game, here is Jontay texting the Telegram group chat again, warning them that they quote-

• 47:59Speaker 01

  Might just get hit with a Rico.

• 48:02Pablo Torre?

  And then he asked if everybody on the group chat had-

• 48:06Speaker 01

  Deleted all the stuff.

• 48:08Pablo Torre?

  Which is high on the list of things that I perhaps would not want to read in a federal indictment in which I am one of the people getting indicted.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  No.

• 48:17Pablo Torre?

  And the group chat unsurprisingly gets deleted, the paper trail, they try to wipe it away. Jontay Porter, very famously banned for life from the NBA and you, Nick, as you know, a fellow former University of Missouri basketball player, you find yourself talking to Jontay Porter two years later about life itself.

• 48:41Speaker 07

  I went to the gun range for a few times just to blow off steam and there was one incident where I, I don't even think my wife knows this, but like held it to my head and I was just like crying, like I can't do this anymore. I can't, I thought my wife was gonna leave me. I don't want to live. The only thing holding me to this earth right now, I think, is my faith in God and my unborn son. I was like, I have to meet him, you know? I can't leave this earth without meeting him.

• 49:06Pablo Torre?

  And this is where I should point out that anybody who is having issues with gambling or considering self-harm can check out the info in our show notes to seek help. But in many ways, Nick, what Jontay Porter seems to be saying is that the intervention he really needed but never fully got finally arrives, thanks to who?

• 49:24Speaker 01

  The FBI.

• 49:25Speaker 07

  I'm glad all that stuff happened with the NBA and getting banned and the public shame and all my dirty laundry out there on the table because my onion layers were so thick. If I didn't lose my NBA job, I would have lost my wife and I would have lost my family's support. I might have even lost my life. Like I would have kept going. I would have kept betting. I would have kept leveraging myself. I would have kept borrowing. I would have kept stealing. I would have kept lying and I'm thankful to God that like, we'll just say the FBI investigated and intervened and I got banned by the NBA because if that didn't happen, I would not be sitting here today. If I was sitting here today, I'd be on my phone trying to figure out the next place I can place the bet.

• 50:02Pablo Torre?

  So for those not familiar, Jontay Porter pleads guilty to wire fraud. He pleads guilty to essentially defrauding the gambling operators. And he now waits for his final sentencing while doing what? What's he doing now?

• 50:17Speaker 01

  He's a stay at home dad. He's got two young sons, just recently born, so really like a newborn. And he's playing like semi-pro basketball. He played for the Seattle Superhawks last year in their semi-pro league. But yeah, he's got this new perspective again, because again, it's always a struggle with addiction to be the version of yourself. Which version of yourself are you? And at least right now, he's found some peace and some kind of calm in being back to this guy that I knew when he was 17, 18 year old.

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• 52:40Pablo Torre?

  I don't doubt at all the depths of his gambling addiction. You provided the documents, the receipts. We've seen it. We fact-checked it. What I do have questions about, though, is the role of the mob. Because in Jante's story, you know, we're peeling the onion layers back in this journalistic group project that we've embarked on together, Nick. And did Jante ever pay or get paid directly by the mob?

• 53:09Speaker 01

  No. He only bet on credit. He never actually exchanged money with anybody from the Jewish mafia or anybody from the Italian mafia.

• 53:18Pablo Torre?

  He was dealing with the influencer guy and with Amar.

• 53:21Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 53:23Pablo Torre?

  And the fitness influencer, this is the guy who had texted Jante about, you know, the Iced Out watches and paying off his debt by selling those, which is interesting because social media is a rich text as well in this sense. And what did you find?

• 53:38Speaker 01

  Jante had been blocked by this guy on Instagram, but I had not. And I'm no watch expert, but I see this guy. I've read these text messages, and I see what appeared to be a lot of these same watches that he had texted, the Iced Out Prezi and the Chandelier AP, wearing them in his Instagram photos.

• 53:53Pablo Torre?

  And that would just be one sort of dot that's worth highlighting. But in addition, you had referenced before, the Jewish mob, quote unquote, the Jews, this guy Murray, who had received those watches as collateral. And what did Murray have to say for himself in all of this?

• 54:13Speaker 01

  If you try the Murray number.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  Murray gives you a dial tone. The number you have dialed does not exist or is no longer in service. It is disconnected. And I look it up, and it traces back to a burner network registered in Midtown, basically.

• 54:35Pablo Torre?

  So let's just continue the survey. You introduced us to this guy Sal, who wanted to have this sit-down with Jante, who was the enforcer for the other guy, Vinnie, these Cosa Nostra Italian mob characters. What happened when you tried to reach out to them?

• 54:54Speaker 01

  Same thing. Dial tone, look up the phone number, belongs to the same wireless carrier as Murray's.

• 55:00Pablo Torre?

  The same burner network.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  Same burner network.

• 55:03Pablo Torre?

  Now, different ethnic crime syndicate, same burner network in the same part of New York City.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  But depending on what era potentially allies, it just depends on what era of the mafia you're talking about.

• 55:15Pablo Torre?

  Our investigation into the cross-cultural mafia alliances does proceed. But Vinnie himself, right? Like, this is the serious guy who is, you know, cutting fingers and [BLEEP]. When you tried to fact-check him, what did you find?

• 55:31Speaker 01

  I never tried to call that number because when I reverse looked it up, it turns out that that number is registered to one of Awada's alleged co-conspirators, this partner from back in the poker world who had been helping facilitate Jante into rigging the prop bets.

• 55:47Pablo Torre?

  So just to be clear, none of the numbers lead to human beings that are discernibly or verifiably who they have been presented to be. And in fact, they lead, in the case of Vinnie, back to Amar's friend from the group chat.

• 56:03Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 56:04Pablo Torre?

  Did Jante tell you that he ever talked to the mob absent these?

• 56:09Speaker 01

  Only over text messages.

• 56:11Pablo Torre?

  You, Nick, believe, based on your reporting, that Jante Porter may have committed a crime? And yes, gotten banned from the NBA as patient zero in this scandal, but that the threat he was seemingly under, that terror from the mob, what you're also saying is that... What?

• 56:31Speaker 01

  He might have been catfished.

• 56:34Pablo Torre?

  And this is where I now wonder about what law enforcement thinks, because the Eastern District of New York, they make a very big deal out of La Cosa Nostra and the Italian mob in this area. What did they have to say?

• 56:48Speaker 01

  Well, at least in the Jante Porter case, none of these cases are going to trial. So we really may never know what evidence they have, me, they being the prosecutors, that any of these people were really actually mobsters. But, you know, they're not going to comment. But I run these records by a former FBI agent who would have investigated this kind of surveillance network before, who's dealt with organized crime before. And basically, what he tells me is that real criminals don't really use internet-based burner phone providers because, duh, you got to register a name and an email address to sign up for an internet burner phone, which is where these Sal and Murray numbers go back to. It kind of defeats the entire purpose of using a burner, to use an internet burner phone, because they can just figure out who you are.

• 57:32Speaker 01

  And then he also pointed out that, you know, if this was kind of this massive DOJ investigation...

• 57:38Pablo Torre?

  Which, by the way, Cash Patel has said, right? This is a fraud that is historic in terms of not just money, but the scheme and the deceit.

• 57:44Speaker 05

  And the deceit.

• 57:45Pablo Torre?

  That is the quote.

• 57:47Speaker 01

  But basically, if this is this big investigation, where is Vinnie? Why isn't this character charged if he's connected to the mob and he's connected to Awada and he's connected to all these other guys who are charged? Then why isn't he roped into it?

• 58:00Pablo Torre?

  And what does your former FBI source say then about Vinnie?

• 58:04Speaker 01

  My FBI source, with the caveat that, of course, we can never know for sure, told me, I would actually be surprised if Vinnie was real.

• 58:12Pablo Torre?

  Quoting your New Yorker story here. Additionally, quote, "Multiple professional betters and a source connected to the case told you they suspected that Amar and the fitness influencer had pulled a common scam", end quote. And I just want to spell out what the scam is, because when you spell it out now in the light of day, Amar tells better he's placing bets with this bookie. If the bets win, well, you can just make an excuse not to pay. If the bets lose, well, guess what? You're owing the middleman your money.

• 58:46Speaker 01

  Here comes Vinnie.

• 58:48Pablo Torre?

  This leaves us with Amar, fittingly, I guess, near the end here. The same guy who thought this podcast was, quote, "a bunch of nonsense", who described himself to you as the middleman, who also said to you, apparently, about the feds swarming his apartment building on the day of his arrest.

• 59:05Speaker 01

  It's a [BLEEP] gambling case, and they're treating me like I'm Pablo Escobar.

• 59:09Pablo Torre?

  It is appropriate that Amar contemplate, finally, what it might be like to be a Pablo. But we should also point out that he did plead guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to influence sporting contests by bribery. This is the Jante Porter sports betting case in particular. But also, in addition to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud in the rigged poker game case, which is even more heavily linked to the mob, and in that case, which is, again, full of these characters, is it safe to say that Amar does actually have connections to the Italian mob?

• 59:42Speaker 01

  Allegedly, you know, reportedly. You could maybe loosely call him an associate, because he was really running these poker games that were connected to Italian mafia.

• 59:51Pablo Torre?

  And so when you then get to finally press this guy who won't take my call about who Vinnie is, if it was really him or a partner wearing this, this kind of shoddy disguise, what does he tell you?

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  It's my favorite line in this story. He just took a deep breath, and he said, "A wise guy once told me, ask me no questions, and I'll tell you no lies."

• 1:00:13Pablo Torre?

  Nick Verdini, former Missouri basketball, in my view, superstar. Thank you for your reporting and thanks for collaborating on this episode.

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  I appreciate it. It was really fun to be here.

• 1:00:35Pablo Torre?

  Pablo Torre Finds Out is produced by Walter Avaroma, Maxwell Carney, Ryan Cortez, Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, Neely Lohman, Rob McCray, Laura Newcomb, Matt Sullivan, Claire Taylor, and Chris Tummanello. Studio engineering by RG Systems, sound design by Andrew Bersik, digital strategy by Bailey Carlin and Andrew Northern, theme song, as always, by John Bravo. And we'll talk to you next time.

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