James”Jimmy””Bah-Bah””The Sheep” Battista was a stressed-out, overweight, Oxy-addicted 41-year-old, in the pit to a underground gamblers for amounts he had sort of lost track of, when he settled in to watch an NBA game for which he thought he would just put in the correct. It was January 2007. A month or so back, long before Christmas, he had done something adventuresome: He had sat down and cut a deal with an NBA referee. He feared the scheme had become overly obvious.
“You want get compensated?” Battista had stated to the ref. “Then you gotta cover the f–ing spread” The bribe was only two dimes, $2,000 per game — an outrageous bargain. In case the choice won, the ref got his two dimes. In case the pick missed, then the ref owed nothing; Battista would consume the reduction. A”free roll,” as they call it. However, this referee didn’t lose much. His picks were winning at an 88% clip, entirely unheard of sports betting for any sustained period of time. They were now entering the sixth week of this scheme — what you might call a sustained period of time.
Battista had understood the ref, Timmy Donaghy, for 25 years. They had gone to the exact same parochial high school at the working-class Catholic neighborhoods of Delaware County, just outside Philadelphia — Delco, as it’s sometimes called — where the sports bars are abundant, where a particular easy familiarity with forms of gambling prevails, where men have bookies like they have got dentists.
Battista was a monster of the world. He was what’s called a mover. Strictly speaking, movers are neither gamblers nor bookmakers. They are a species of agent that provides solutions to sports bettors, laying down wagers on their customers’ behalf with bookmakers of various sorts around the world, legal and not. Battista was positioned well in that world that, without Donaghy’s understanding but based on Donaghy’s selections, he’d helped put up a sort of loose, disorderly hedge fund. Several individuals from the sports-betting underworld had, in consequence, staked Battista a bankroll — a finance he was currently having to bet games officiated by this one NBA referee. 1 member of the group called it”the ticket” and”the corporation.”
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