Hoopfellas: We Investigated the "Puppet Master" of NBA Gambling

Speaker 1 Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

Speaker 2 So, that's why I'm saying: if anybody thinks there's sports betting, you got to just understand there's going to be highs and there's going to be lows.

Speaker 1 Right after this ad

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Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 1 I mean, I don't even have time to do the nonsense with you because

Speaker 1 A,

Speaker 1 I have a montage I'm about to press play on, and B,

Speaker 1 this has to do with the Department of Justice, which you might have heard about last week. All right, we're turning to the breaking news out of the NBA.

Speaker 1 Sprawling FBI probe into mafia-linked gambling and sports rigging schemes are sending shockwaves across the NBA and the United States.

Speaker 1 The FBI arresting a coach in Portland, as well as current and former players. This is the insider trading saga for the NBA.

Speaker 7 That's what this is.

Speaker 1 That's why we are going to take heat.

Speaker 9 Trump is coming. Big night for the NBA.
Wembiana put on a show. That has now been smeared because we're talking about this story.

Speaker 1 Okay. It was really hard to pick which clips would go into that montage.
There was a lot.

Speaker 8 So many to pick from. And yet there's always this incredible desire in me to nitpick whether it's Cash Patel saying Inschrider.

Speaker 8 trading or Stephen A. Smith saying Wembiana.

Speaker 1 I think I also have to just nitpick and point out that, in fact, this investigation, which Cash Patel is declaring behind that podium, it did start underneath the Biden administration, like years ago.

Speaker 1 And also,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But we were not blindsided, actually. We here at Pablo Torrey Finds Out.

Speaker 1 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 D.C.

Speaker 1 And what they told us is the following: quote: Doing anything better than cash battle is not a badge of honor, but you guys are even staying ahead of that guy, end quote.

Speaker 8 I urge everyone to go back to listen to our episode from July.

Speaker 1 July.

Speaker 8 A lot about Malik 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.

Speaker 1 What are the code names of the two federal investigations that resulted in these two indictments?

Speaker 8 I hate this more than anything because I know there's someone whose job it is to think of stupid puns that they're going to name their operations after. These were called Operation Royal Flush

Speaker 8 and also Operation Nothing But Bet.

Speaker 1 Yes, that's right.

Speaker 1 Operation Royal Flush alleges a multi-million 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But the real headline here, I mean, is that two former NBA players, current Blazers head coach Chauncey Billops, and former Cavs and Lakers assistant Damon Jones, were two of the 31 defendants, alongside several members, allegedly, of Witch Criminal Enterprise, I mean.

Speaker 8 La Cosa Nostra.

Speaker 1 La Cosa Nostra. This thing of ours.
This thing of ours.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 8 You got to differentiate because if you have multiple Tony, you got to say which Tony are we talking about? Black Tony.

Speaker 1 Ah, got it. And what the federal indictment also wants to make clear.

Speaker 1 allegedly, is that Chauncey Phillips 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 Billops 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 Billops before and who agreed to talk to us if we did that thing where we modulate their voice.

Speaker 10 I remember back in April 2019,

Speaker 10 I got

Speaker 11 word from different people in poker that there was this game that was going to be happening in LA and in Vegas.

Speaker 10 And it was run around Kevin Garnett and Chauncey Phillips. 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?

Speaker 10 And a friend of mine, who's a really, really good poker player, who's playing in the game,

Speaker 10 I remember told me that day about this hand that he played with Chauncey.

Speaker 10 And he said it was just super weird.

Speaker 10 And it was like some really big pot, maybe $200,000 or somewhere in that range, where Chauncey Billops just like put all the money in with a gut shot draw, which is just like a really weak hand.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 Like, how can he call, like, I don't understand what's going on in the hand.

Speaker 1 And I mean, this is where I just got to jump in to clarify two quick things.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Garnett, the source goes on to say, has not yet been contacted by the feds. So just to be clear here.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But the poker of this all, Amelian, are you a poker guy? Do you play poker?

Speaker 8 No, but I play one on TV.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you do have the whole like Chris Moneymaker ass sunglasses on. Yeah.
And I'm not either, by the way. I'm not a poker guy either.

Speaker 1 But the other thing that I did obtain here, the second thing is... the specific hand that Chauncey Billup played that my poker source was describing.

Speaker 1 And we're going to 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,

Speaker 1 multiple poker experts laughingly describe Billup's 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 to mean, of course, unless Chauncey Billup was allegedly using a rigged shuffling machine in April 2019, as this indictment specifically alleges.

Speaker 8 Chauncey Billops in Operation Royal Flush is being charged with basically being the guy who is a face card. Rich people are like, ooh, I want to play cards with Chauncey Billops.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 1 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's reputation and his freedom for anything, let alone a card game.

Speaker 1 But I do just need to jump into our conversation with our friend Amin El Hassan, the former basketball operations executive with the Phoenix Suns, because something else you should know is that Chauncey Billips 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.

Speaker 1 According to multiple sources with direct knowledge of that April 2019 game in Vegas that we've been discussing here, the same one where Billips 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 Liu.

Speaker 1 who was at the time an assistant coach for the Clippers.

Speaker 1 Now, sources say that Lou did not play at the same table as Chauncey Phillips, 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.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 the ARIA high limit bar.

Speaker 1 Often alongside another retired NBA player whom Lou had separately hired to his coaching staff in Cleveland and who has called Lou

Speaker 1 his best friend,

Speaker 1 Damon Jones.

Speaker 1 Which makes for, you know, just one hell of a best friend triangle.

Speaker 1 In fact, in June of 2024, both Ty Liu 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.

Speaker 1 As seen on the broadcast of that event,

Speaker 1 come on, man.

Speaker 1 Tayluski, come on, man.

Speaker 8 Westside rolling.

Speaker 1 Die, Tom. What's your number? What's your number? What's your number, T.
Lou? Every fail. What's your number, T.
Lewiski?

Speaker 1 Last week, we here at Pablitori Finds Out asked Clippers PR about Lou's attendance at that allegedly rigged game in Vegas in April 2019.

Speaker 1 The same one with Billips that was mentioned in the federal indictment. And the Clippers

Speaker 1 did not respond.

Speaker 1 But going back to that same game in question,

Speaker 1 eventually, my anonymous poker playing

Speaker 1 did hear that something was up.

Speaker 10 A year later, you know, a friend came back to me and said for sure, like that game was cheated.

Speaker 1 And then other people had heard about that in Vegas.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 1 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 source's contemporaneous text messages from the time related to that poker hand.

Speaker 1 But the other federal investigation, Operation Nothing But Bet, which is arguably even worse as a name, it does something more, right?

Speaker 1 Because it names current heat guard Terry Rogier and once again, Damon Jones as two of the six listed defendants, all of whom the federal government has charged with wire fraud 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 Rogier to apparently LeBron James and Damian Lillard.

Speaker 1 The latter info coming allegedly from a conspicuously thinly veiled co-conspirator.

Speaker 8 I mean, co-conspirator number eight, an individual whose identity is known to the grand jury, was a resident of Oregon.

Speaker 8 Co-conspirator number eight was an NBA player from approximately 1997 through 2014 and and an NBA coach since at least 2021. Ladies and gentlemen, one guy in league history fits that description.

Speaker 8 It's Chauncey Billops.

Speaker 1 It's kind of like they said, and his name is C. Billops.
No wait. Chauncey B.,

Speaker 1 the noted Hall of Famer. And I appreciate you, by the way, cleaning up the DOJ's typo.
They forgot to put the...

Speaker 1 Of. Of in resident of Oregon, just as a matter of, you know, just pointing out some stuff here as a journalist.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 is that they have been saying this is two non-intersecting parallel operations. They are two separate operations.

Speaker 1 But to me, I mean, what we learned three months ago was that the rigged poker scandal does have some touch points at the roots of it with the NBA betting scandal.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 And Moose, as it turns out, was the cousin of one Amar Awade,

Speaker 8 who you might recognize that name from the indictments that came down last week.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Now, former Pistons guard Malik Beasley was broken. Ex-user Freemoose underscore NBA predicted that Malik Beasley would be the next NBA gambling scandal.
Quote,

Speaker 1 first was Jante,

Speaker 1 then was Rogier. Next, you'll hear about M, star, star, star, star, B, star, star, star, star, star, otherwise known again in that very unsubtle way as Malik Beasley.

Speaker 8 Might as well work for the DOJ.

Speaker 1 I know. We're unmasking everybody today.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Yes, by the name of Amar Awade.

Speaker 1 Even though, by the way, Moose previously denied that very fact to our friend Tom Haberstrow in a July interview that went from extremely talkative to suddenly extremely strained.

Speaker 13 Are you friends with or do you know Amar Awade?

Speaker 13 No.

Speaker 13 No?

Speaker 13 No.

Speaker 13 Okay, because I saw that you're Facebook friends with Amar, and so I figured maybe that was somehow you could, you were associated with him.

Speaker 13 No.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Amar Awade was also a charter member, I mean, of the infamous Jante Porter group chat, which is the wellspring, I'm here to argue, from which this entire saga actually originates.

Speaker 1 And for those who don't remember, this is the group chat where Jante Porter, who at the time was an obscure Raptors backup facing down gambling debt too, among others, Amar Awade,

Speaker 1 told the chat he was going to pull himself out of Pacific 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 that people were gambling on.

Speaker 1 And in fact,

Speaker 1 in a photo that we're going to show on screen here, you can see Amarawade in the red hoodie on the left.

Speaker 1 This is the photo from the exact day that the group chat was allegedly working together to place bets on Jante Porter. This was taken to mean at the illustrious Resorts Casino in Atlantic City.

Speaker 1 And what you should also know is that before Jante 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 cell phones and warning them also that they, quote, might just get hit with a Rico,

Speaker 1 end quote.

Speaker 8 Criminal mastermind, Mr. Porter is not.

Speaker 1 Those texts to mean were sent in April of 2024. Jante Porter got banned banned for life from the NBA later that same month.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 8 Baseline at a Knicks Sixers game in Madison Square Garden, I believe, in close proximity to Carmelo Anthony.

Speaker 1 Yes, he did dap up Mello.

Speaker 1 But Amar Awaday, 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But we did find him all over Operation Royal Flush, the whole rig poker game investigation we talked about. So could you please read from that indictment?

Speaker 8 The defendant, Amar Awade,

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 Awade was an organizer of the Washington Place game and with others, organized rig games at the Washington Place game, among other places.

Speaker 1 Now, I don't know what it's like for you to discover that, oh, 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 Awaday.

Speaker 1 And this person said to me that Flappy was texting people to come to his poker games even after Amar Awaday was very publicly identified as involved in the whole Jante Porter NBA betting scandal.

Speaker 1 And yet, the figure we're here to focus on in this episode is not Flappy or Chauncey.

Speaker 1 It is a different person associated with that original Jante Porter group chat.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 over there.

Speaker 8 Right now, I feel like I'm Russell Crowe, an American gangster, and we're about to point to the photo, the man really on top of this whole scheme, the guy who brings it all together.

Speaker 8 All the strings on our Pepe Sylvia board are pointing to Hoomst.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Now,

Speaker 1 after the break. Damn.

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Speaker 1 I mean, there are a lot of characters to choose from in this story.

Speaker 1 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. Can you please read Exhibit A?

Speaker 8 Terry Rosier at T underscore Rose3, May 1st, 2011.

Speaker 8 Osama should have hooped instead of trying to kill people because he tall as hell. We updated May 1st, 2023.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's a good take. It's a strong take.

Speaker 8 It's a strong take. Osama Bila was 6'7, folks.

Speaker 1 That's what we're into.

Speaker 1 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 Rogier on our YouTube channel.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I mean, he's still got it.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 1 He got a first-round pick in that trade that the Heat made for Terry Roger from the Hornets.

Speaker 8 They sure did. Sorry, there's no return policy on that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there was a no-backseize policy in the NBA, despite the fact that there are multiple federal indictments looming.

Speaker 1 But we leave that aside for now because that controversy is not what we're focusing on here.

Speaker 1 Our focus, I mean, is on the only person in this story with an even richer social media history than Scary Scary Terry.

Speaker 1 Because this person did get named as a defendant in both Operation Royal Flush and Operation Nothing But Bet.

Speaker 1 And this person at age 40 is the type of guy who recently posted this on his Instagram account at best that ever did it, which finally went private, regrettably, in the last week.

Speaker 8 It's a post of a meme and it says, yes, I support LGBT,

Speaker 8 where the L is for Latinas, G is for gambling, B is for beer.

Speaker 8 And is this a tax evasion?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 This, I mean, is the account of one Sugar Shane Hennon, who is an LGBT advocate of a different kind.

Speaker 1 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 f

Speaker 1 for me. And maybe it is just me, but in case you're not watching on YouTube, you should know that Shane Hannon also looks like this, which is to say that he kind of looks like if

Speaker 1 Clipper's 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 of criminal conspiracy related to using gambling devices in dice games.

Speaker 1 He looks like a cleaned up Carl Pilkington.

Speaker 8 If you ever watched An Idiot Abroad with with Ricky Gervage and Stephen Merchant? He looks like Carl Pilkington if he really took care of himself.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Is that wrong?

Speaker 8 We're not supposed to do that? Well, I had to tell you, I got to plead ignorance on this. Well,

Speaker 1 I should point out that less than two weeks after the stabbing, Shane Hennan then got arrested for selling cocaine in a casino parking lot, ultimately serving two and a half years in prison.

Speaker 8 Not a good month for Shane Hennan, huh? All these things happening.

Speaker 1 But after all of that, what Sugar Shane Hennan decided to do was start anew.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 8 Worked hard at a straight job.

Speaker 1 Exactly right he became an online sports betting expert

Speaker 2 everybody keeps saying oh my gosh shane you won a million dollars on on the weekend you won a million dollars on sunday like holy

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 So that's what I'm saying. If anybody thinks there's sports betting, you got to just understand there's going to be highs and there's going to be lows.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 1 Who also kind of sounded like Joe Pesci and Goodfellas.

Speaker 16 I'm funny how. I mean, funny, like I'm a clown.
I am.

Speaker 16 I make you laugh. I'm here to f ⁇ ing amuse you.
What do you mean, funny? Funny, how? How am I funny?

Speaker 1 Could we make that person?

Speaker 1 And God said,

Speaker 1 I got you.

Speaker 8 Oh, my beer.

Speaker 1 That clip, by the way, is kind of admittedly almost eerily introspective, right? He starts talking about the highs and the lows, a moment of just sort of like lucidity.

Speaker 1 I mean, an account that otherwise is, for the record, with 90,000 on UCLA plus five and a half.

Speaker 1 Hawking pics, posting lots of betting slips, uploading various videos of himself with private jets and stacks of cash at yet more poker tables.

Speaker 17 Somebody like he 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 go.

Speaker 1 For instance, I mean, here are two videos that Shane Hennen posted just last month. The first one.

Speaker 8 I see Shane Hennen's got sunglasses on. He's got a white button-up shirt.
And I believe he's chugging a bottle of Casamigo's reposado.

Speaker 1 Well spotted I mean yeah thank you. 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.

Speaker 8 Now it's Shane Hennen sitting down in that same white button-up shirt with a champagne flute in his mouth, but he's not holding it up Pablo.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 8 What's holding up the other end of the glass is an attractive young blonde woman in a swimsuit that is patterned with what appears to be $100 bills.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 there's another picture I want to show you, which Shane posted in 2018. This one after he had done...
30 more days in custody.

Speaker 1 This was the end result of getting pulled over for a DUI in the suburbs of somewhere in Missouri. And apparently he had about 14 grand worth of gambling winnings in his car.

Speaker 8 It is a stack of money, but it's not dollars, Pablo. No, these are Euros.
And it's like a 500-Euro note, but it's like a stack of a bunch of them. So I don't know.

Speaker 8 Call it maybe about 40 or 50 500 Euro notes spread out on what looks like a seat.

Speaker 1 The 500 Euro note, I do want to take a beat to observe this here.

Speaker 1 It no longer exists.

Speaker 1 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 $500 bill, the 500 Euro note had become the underworld's currency of choice for money laundering and terrorism financing.

Speaker 1 And in fact, according to The Guardian, the 500 Euro note even had a nickname, a nickname that I dare say Terry Rogier might approve of. What do you think that nickname is?

Speaker 8 Oh, man.

Speaker 8 Osama's?

Speaker 1 The Bin Laden is what we were looking for. Cos.

Speaker 8 I went first name. I went too comfortable.
I went too familiar. I'm sorry.

Speaker 1 Because, quote, While many people know what it looks like, few have ever seen one.

Speaker 1 End quote.

Speaker 1 The bin Laden. You know what?

Speaker 8 Whoever came up with that, that's who the FBI needs to hire to come up with the operation names. Because that's great.

Speaker 1 I know. That's just

Speaker 1 poetic. So, yeah, few people had ever seen one, unless, of course, you followed Sugar Shane Hennon's Instagram account, which also showed you things like Shane Hennon's literal ass.

Speaker 1 Let me read the caption, please.

Speaker 8 My ass white AF

Speaker 8 laughing emoji. If you're not living life, what you doing?

Speaker 1 What are we doing as we watch the time-lapse of Shane Hennen's ass swim across truly like beautifully translucent water in the Maldives?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 He is also, according to the allegations in Operation Royal Flush,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And these photos, you can now see, because of that indictment.

Speaker 8 Yes, it is the Deckmate 2 shuffler. It's been taken apart on a table from...

Speaker 8 the iCloud account of one of the defendants.

Speaker 1 And then the next photo, you can sort of see, like a computer program thing.

Speaker 8 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 the original incarnation.

Speaker 1 The sequel is never as good. But now, I mean, given this backdrop, if we turn to the other indictment, Operation Nothing But Bet,

Speaker 1 what we find is that Shane Hannon

Speaker 1 does appear again. But he's almost like buried in this indictment.
He doesn't lead any of the sections that we can read.

Speaker 1 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 going to be taking himself out of a hornets game in New Orleans.

Speaker 1 I mean, and the reason that Shane Hennen was told this, according to the government, was clear.

Speaker 8 So that Hennan, both himself and through a network of straw bettors, could place bets on the defendant Terry Rozier's unders.

Speaker 8 And later on it says, Hennan marshaled a network of associates to place bets on Rozier's unders at Hennan's direction.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 with the information that allegedly originated from Chauncey Billips about his tanking blazers and also with the intel about Jante Porter, whose text message about his one-man Raptors tank job was forwarded straight to Shane Hennan, allegedly.

Speaker 1 But in this case, the case with Terry Rogier, Rogier took himself out of his March 2023 game after less than 10 minutes as scheduled.

Speaker 1 And you can see, in fact, this exact moment, I mean, that he started grabbing at his injured, quote-unquote, right foot.

Speaker 1 only for less than a week later, allegedly, two other named defendants to come visit Shane Hennan in Philadelphia to pick up their winnings, the winnings they got betting Terry Roger unders in that game.

Speaker 1 And some of those winnings, according to this indictment, got delivered back to Terry Rogier himself.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 8 As a result of this investigation, you can just tell us what the charges are. They can just say it.
This is the indictment. This is what happened.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 8 Sir, I read the New York Post every single day I was in high school. The people come up with those back page headlines are like Keats compared to these DOJ hacks.

Speaker 1 Right. The New York Post for the record went with hoop fellas, which I think is a lot better.

Speaker 1 Yeah. You know, but look, headless, body, and topless bar, the gold standard, all of us are still just, you know, we're pretending.

Speaker 8 We're playing for second.

Speaker 1 That's right.

Speaker 1 But as for the plight of Terry Rogier and him leaving that game in March of 2023 with a supposed right foot problem that you saw before.

Speaker 1 The NBA says that it was alerted to irregular betting activity by the sports book in question right away.

Speaker 1 A source at the league office tells PTFO, quote, once we heard about it, the wheels started turning. We were deliberate, end quote.

Speaker 1 But according to multiple sources familiar with the situation, the NBA waited until late spring to conduct its own internal investigation of Rogier, at least in earnest.

Speaker 1 This was an investigation that would be led by the league's external law firm of choice, Wachtel Lipton.

Speaker 1 And Rogier, we are told, sat for a Zoom interview and he handed over his cell phone to the league, which was in turn handed over to league investigators looking for specific search terms.

Speaker 1 Except NBA investigators did not find a smoking gun violation on Rogier's phone, according to these sources.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And instead, they chose to defer to the feds, who, according to Rogier's attorney, Jim Trustee, quote, appear to be taking the word of spectacularly incredible sources rather than relying on actual evidence of wrongdoing.

Speaker 1 Terry was cleared by the NBA, and these prosecutors revived that non-case,

Speaker 1 end quote.

Speaker 1 But on Wednesday, our source in the NBA League office disputed that to Pablo Torre finds out, quote, Terry's investigation was never closed, so he was not cleared of anything.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And the last thing you should know here is that on Tuesday, Jim Trusty, Rogier's attorney, went on Fox News to say, quote, I'm not here to defend anybody else in the indictment.

Speaker 1 There's a bunch of people. Terry doesn't even know if he could pick them out of a lineup, end quote.

Speaker 1 But what has not yet been reported about the whole cash collection thing that happened in Philly, I mean, is that Shane Hennen, true to form, perhaps, was not exactly laying low here.

Speaker 1 You may recall, in fact, how we found Shane's friend, Amar Awade, aka Flappy, watching the Knicks courtside days after Jante Porter got banned for life.

Speaker 1 Well, on at best that ever did it, you can see exactly where Shane Hennan happened to be on March 29th, 2023, when those guys allegedly traveled to Philly to collect.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow.

Speaker 8 Here we go. We're sitting, it looks like courtside at a game

Speaker 8 with the caption, when my partner come to Philly and win the drip cam, make me got to step my game up.

Speaker 8 Rolling, laughing emoji, rolling, laughing emoji at Vezino underscore locks. Ice cold emoji, ice cold emoji, ice cold emoji.

Speaker 1 That's right.

Speaker 1 This is a photo courtside at a Sixers game on March 29th, 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

Speaker 1 is going to shock you, Amin, is is also a sports betting expert.

Speaker 1 He sells picks under his Instagram handle, yes, at Vezzino underscore locks.

Speaker 7 It's Vezzino Locks, man, I'm three.

Speaker 1 Vezzino Locks on three, baby. Come on.

Speaker 1 One, two, three. Vezzino Locks.

Speaker 1 He has, in fact, pled not guilty. I want to be very clear about this.
Not guilty to this whole thing. But back in the timeline of this specific federal indictment from the United States government.

Speaker 1 We go from the Terry Rogier game on March 23rd, 2023 to the Blazers game the very next day, March 24th, 2023, which is when Shane Hennen and company allegedly profited off of inside information allegedly supplied by head coach Chauncey Phillips about Dame Lillard being out of the game.

Speaker 1 And then we go to the Dante Porter scheme, which started with Bets in January, 2024 and was forever memorialized at that food court in Atlantic City in March of 2024.

Speaker 1 But in January of 2025, okay, this is this year.

Speaker 1 Something important happened. I mean, in the jet setting, sports betting, tequila chugging life of Sugar Shane Hennan.

Speaker 1 Because

Speaker 1 at the best that ever did it, he was finally arrested by the feds at the Las Vegas airport.

Speaker 1 This was part of the case that originated with his friend, Amara Wade, and the whole John Tay Porter group chat. And I'd like you to please read from the following court document that we obtained.

Speaker 8 On January 8, 2025, the defendant purchased a one-way ticket to Colombia, connecting through Panama, which was scheduled to depart from Harry Reed International Airport in Las Vegas, Nevada, HRI, on January 12, 2025.

Speaker 8 The defendant was arrested in connection with the complaint at HRI as he attempted to board the above-referenced flight to Panama.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 Upon arrest, the defendant also stated to law enforcement agents unprompted that he was traveling to Colombia to purportedly seek dental treatment.

Speaker 1 I am told reliably that Colombia might be considered the best that ever did it at dentistry.

Speaker 8 They are the turkey of the Western Hemisphere.

Speaker 1 What turkey is to hairlines, Colombia reportedly is to your grill.

Speaker 8 They do teeth too in Turkey now.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I mean, if you can read this part:

Speaker 8 The defendant's motive to flee is obvious.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 Among other evidence, witnesses, phone records, financial records, and betting records confirmed 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 8 And this is Russell Crowe putting up the picture.

Speaker 1 There's our guy, this is our Frank Lucas.

Speaker 1 Allegedly. So, the question that we've been circling here for months now is: this:

Speaker 1 After Shane Hennen 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,

Speaker 1 how in the f did Shane Hennen get released that same day?

Speaker 1 Good lawyer?

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Speaker 1 So, I mean, this is the part of the story where we here at Pablo Torrey 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 Cash Patel and the NYPD Commissioner and the whole array of federal prosecutors.

Speaker 1 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 Hennen's original court docket.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so when you walk into the courthouse, I mean, you got to hand over your phone, you got to 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.

Speaker 1 And what you find in that transcript is that Shane Hennen and the U.S. government have started plea negotiations.
And that at one point, the judge says the following about Shane.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 So we'll enter that on the docket, end quote.

Speaker 1 And what the rest of that docket says is that in the case of the United States of America v.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 8 Not leave the following areas except for travel to and from court and the checkbox selected is continental United States

Speaker 8 and abstain from all alcohol use,

Speaker 8 shall use his true name only and not use any false identifiers. That is checked as well.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 U.S.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Let's just go with it. Let's actually just take that discrepancy at face value.

Speaker 1 Because it is also worth reminding everybody that those videos of Shane Hennen chugging the Casamigos that you identified and having that glass of alcohol fed to him by that woman covered in

Speaker 1 Ben Franklin's face,

Speaker 1 those were posted by Shane Hennan on September 25th, 2025.

Speaker 1 Meaning,

Speaker 1 this was while he and the government continued to negotiate his ongoing plea agreement, according to court records.

Speaker 8 Pablo, those videos were taken in the continental United States. One out of three ain't bad.
That's Hall of Fame in baseball.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Now, what I should say here is that we reached out to Shane Hennen and his attorney asking for interviews and sending a detailed list of questions, like whether Shane Hennen should really be considered, as he was by the U.S.

Speaker 1 Attorney's Office, the quote-unquote orchestrating force, basically the puppet master of this whole scandal. Or like

Speaker 1 why that whole thing about how maybe Shane should not be gambling while out on bail

Speaker 1 and how the assistant U.S. Attorney was like, we hadn't really discussed it, but okay.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And on Wednesday, we finally received this statement from Shane Hennen's lawyer. Quote,

Speaker 1 this case is still in its early stages and we have not yet had the opportunity to review all of the discovery. Mr.

Speaker 1 Hennan will be entering a plea of not guilty to all charges in the indictment and maintains his innocence, end quote.

Speaker 1 The lawyer then added that he would address the court this Thursday when Hennan is scheduled to be arraigned in New York City.

Speaker 1 Around when this episode publishes, which raises another key question as we review evidence hiding in plain sight while searching for Sugar Shane.

Speaker 8 What else is Shane up to, by the way?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 At best that ever did it posted an Instagram carousel, I mean, with the caption,

Speaker 1 life

Speaker 1 lately.

Speaker 1 Oh,

Speaker 8 this is Instagram royalty right here. That caption, life lately.
Look at that. He's outside.

Speaker 1 So that, I believe that's outside the garden, outside of Madison Square Garden.

Speaker 8 This looks a lot like brickle down in Miami.

Speaker 1 You're like a geo-guesser for degenerate hangouts.

Speaker 8 Dude, I'll tell you, like, this is my life. Oh, yep, there he is.
He's at a heat game. He's staring at

Speaker 8 someone. And let's now we're at the satai.
It looks like it's a resort, Miami Beach. Yep.

Speaker 1 Drinking out of a coconut. I want to go back to that Heat game, the one where he was sitting baseline.
The Heat are playing the Clippers.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 with the number two.

Speaker 1 Amin?

Speaker 8 Guys,

Speaker 8 we're not doing this, are we?

Speaker 1 Amin, who wears number two for the Miami Heat?

Speaker 8 I believe it's a man they affectionately call Scary Terry.

Speaker 1 You may remember, Amin, 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.

Speaker 1 This photo was from March of this year. Just to reiterate that, it's March 12th.

Speaker 8 How do y'all keep getting me on these, man?

Speaker 1 March 12th, 2025. Clippers Heat, a game that has not been mentioned in any of the indictments.

Speaker 1 Enhance.

Speaker 8 Oh my gosh.

Speaker 1 Enhance.

Speaker 8 You could not have set it out better as a picture, as a framing.

Speaker 8 Right off of Terry Rosier, as he's crossing the ever-living f ⁇ out of Nicolas Batum,

Speaker 8 in the same crack in between his upper thigh and his chest, you know, that angle that's being created by his body in the crossover.

Speaker 8 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 Hennen.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so this brings us to the question that we have been circling for months now.

Speaker 1 And that question is also a question that isn't just raised because of the behavior that Shane Hennan himself was documenting on Instagram.

Speaker 1 It has been raised because of that story that I referenced before.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 stabbed that guy in the neck at a pool hall in Pittsburgh in 2009.

Speaker 8 That That was a real tough month for him.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 That rough month, turns out, lasted for a while longer and did not resolve itself until 2011, when then 26-year-old Shane Hennen took the stand in what I can only describe as a mad lib of a mob trial to testify.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 and I did not know this existed, some sort of cocaine pressing machine.

Speaker 1 All of this taking place in Shane's hometown of Pittsburgh.

Speaker 8 The Deckmaster 3?

Speaker 1 The equivalent, I can only presume, of cocaine pressing.

Speaker 1 Anyway.

Speaker 1 This is where, I mean, I'm going to invite you to do that thing where we do a table read together in which you are going to have to play Shane Hennan reliving some of his personal legal history and I'm going to play the role of the government lawyer.

Speaker 8 Okay.

Speaker 1 Now, Mr. Hennan, you've been convicted in federal court for cocaine dealing.
Is that correct?

Speaker 8 Yes, I have.

Speaker 1 Did you plead guilty or were you convicted at a trial?

Speaker 8 I pled guilty.

Speaker 1 And did you have a plea agreement?

Speaker 8 Yes, I did.

Speaker 1 Did the plea agreement have any provisions concerning cooperation?

Speaker 8 It would just help me to do with my sentence.

Speaker 1 And when you say it would help you reduce your sentence, what are we talking about? My cooperation. What does cooperation mean?

Speaker 8 Giving information that I know about.

Speaker 1 Now, after that, I'm now the Bosnian ringleader's associate's lawyer.

Speaker 1 When you got arrested, did you agree to cooperate quickly?

Speaker 8 Yes.

Speaker 1 All right. How quickly?

Speaker 8 That day.

Speaker 1 As soon as you got popped, you said, I'm gonna cooperate. Yeah.

Speaker 1 All right. Now, you indicated that you on many occasions went to other places to gamble.

Speaker 1 Did you know that it was a condition of your bond that you were not allowed to leave the state without permission?

Speaker 8 That I was.

Speaker 1 You disregarded that.

Speaker 8 Yes.

Speaker 1 All right. Now, isn't it in fact true that the federal government actually paid for you to go to Detroit?

Speaker 8 That they did.

Speaker 1 All right. And that was so that you could try to set someone up there.

Speaker 2 That's correct.

Speaker 1 You didn't want to go to jail for a 10-year mandatory.

Speaker 8 That's correct.

Speaker 1 And you said, I'll cooperate. That's correct.
Real quickly.

Speaker 8 Yep.

Speaker 1 All right. Because you had to look out for yourself.

Speaker 8 That's correct.

Speaker 1 No one else is going to look out for you, right?

Speaker 8 That's correct.

Speaker 1 In fact, no one's really looked out for you your entire adult life.

Speaker 8 That's correct.

Speaker 1 And that's why you're out here hustling and cheating people.

Speaker 8 That's correct.

Speaker 1 Insane.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So he was only allowed to travel in Florida for his alleged new job as a sales rep for a seafood wholesaler.

Speaker 1 But according to a 2015 court document, Shane Hennan spent those four years going to Vegas to gamble. That's correct.
This, even when the government denied his request.

Speaker 1 And according to the court document, I I mean, Shane Hennen even showed his parole officers his winnings from a trip he made in 2014.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 8 In case you were wondering, where is he?

Speaker 8 It's got the money, it's got the chips with the name of the establishment on it.

Speaker 1 Hmm.

Speaker 8 You get what you you incent, right? If the incentive structures provided reinforce the behavior that you're getting, guess what? You are going to continue to get that behavior.

Speaker 8 And so Shukrashane Hennen,

Speaker 1 it might seem ballsy to us,

Speaker 8 but as we're presenting more and more of this kind of evidence of the pattern of behavior, it's because it was reinforced.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 1 And in Shane Hanning'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.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 to end his official supervised release, which the government denied, citing Shane's, quote, non-compliance.

Speaker 1 Of course, you will not be surprised to learn that he posted yet another video that same day of himself boarding a private jet.

Speaker 1 And all of this seemed to come crashing down when Shane did get pulled over for that DUI I referenced many moons ago. This was in Missouri, outside of St.
Louis in 2017.

Speaker 1 He had more than the $14,000 I mentioned in cash, and Shane claimed that that money was gambling winnings.

Speaker 1 His probation officer then had to flag it. But three months after that DUI arrest,

Speaker 1 he could not help himself

Speaker 1 because he posted this on Instagram. Yeah,

Speaker 8 it's him and Lil John.

Speaker 1 Oh, God.

Speaker 8 And the caption says, Lil John at Jewel Nightclub, which I believe is at ARIA

Speaker 8 at Alejandro underscore tj2lv

Speaker 8 had it lit last night

Speaker 1 notably little john the uh you know worldwide recording artist um has a shirt that i think says uh

Speaker 1 you snapchat on it um anyway all of this brings us back to 2025 now this is when shane hennon got arrested You will recall in January at the Vegas airport, headed on a one-way flight to Colombia for dental work that I can only imagine would have made Lil John proud, as little John is flashing his own grill in that photo.

Speaker 1 And what happens, of course, is that Shane Hennen winds up frequenting after that arrest, the Aria High Limit Bar once again.

Speaker 8 I can't wait to go back to Summer League. I'm going to go hang out at that bar.

Speaker 1 Yeah, apparently, like the Aria High Limit Bar is the Moz Eisley cantina of the professional basketball world.

Speaker 8 A den of scum and villainy.

Speaker 1 As my poker source that you heard from before can personally attest this summer in vegas

Speaker 10 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 kind of networks

Speaker 10 and

Speaker 10 and shane was there every day

Speaker 10 And so a bunch of us are talking like, why would he be here?

Speaker 11 It makes no sense. Like, why is he just hanging out?

Speaker 11 You know, during the World Series of Poker and even after that, like every weekend in Vegas at the Ariel Bar, like this guy just got indicted for like a huge crime. Shouldn't he be in jail?

Speaker 10 And so I started asking around to different people and multiple people put two and two together that

Speaker 10 Shane is a government informant.

Speaker 8 He's not Joe Pessey. He's Henry Hill.
He's Rayleot's character in Goodfellas. He's a rat.

Speaker 1 Allegedly.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And yes, it is recalling that line in Goodfellas, if they are correct, when Ray Liota, Henry Hill, talks about turning on his crew. He goes,

Speaker 1 the hardest thing for me.

Speaker 1 Leaving the life.

Speaker 8 I still love the life.

Speaker 1 And we were treated like movie stars with muscle. We had it all just for the asking.

Speaker 1 As he told us himself in his maldives swimming picture if you're not living a life what are you doing bare white ass and i should be clear of course that this theory around shane hennon'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 we're just asking questions

Speaker 1 I mean, before I let you go here, 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.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 otherwise known as Moose's cousin, otherwise known as Flappy, was doing the same for him.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 We started making calls as a result about Terry Rogere, which is how... We happened to break that news on Twitter before Sham Sharania and ESPN Thursday morning.

Speaker 21 The games in the New York area were backed by the Bonano, Gambino, and Genovese crime families of La Casa Nostra.

Speaker 21 While the cases are separate, there are three overlapping defendants charged in both cases. Damon Jones, Eric Ernest, and Shane Hennen.

Speaker 1 And I just do need to clarify. I mean, that Damon Jones and Eric Ernest, mentioned there by U.S.
Attorney Joe Nicella, have pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And there are basically two clubhouse-leading theories that we need to reckon with at the end here.

Speaker 1 In the first theory, the poker underworld that we heard from is actually onto something.

Speaker 1 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 as a future star witness, feeding the government valuable information, including pictures of the deckmate two shuffler from his iCloud account, in order to save his own ass when it comes to his plea agreement.

Speaker 1 This is what would explain why perhaps he was seemingly moving about the country, sitting courtside watching Terry Rogier cross over Nicholas Batum, and also hanging out invariably.

Speaker 1 apparently at the ARIA high limit area moving around with de facto diplomatic community allegedly That's the first theory.

Speaker 1 But now I want to give you the second theory, I mean, which I find even more poetic in its own right. Because in this second theory, according to my federal prosecutor sources, Shane Hennan

Speaker 1 is not going to be a star witness for the government, actually.

Speaker 1 And that would explain why he was named as a defendant in both cases.

Speaker 1 Because while Shane Hennan 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 Hennan may have made a crucial mistake,

Speaker 1 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 $100 bill printed swimsuit, that behavior

Speaker 1 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 Hennen, who has been historically eager to give that information.

Speaker 1 But precisely how much remains in question, as Shane Hennen might not have gotten the protection that he sought in exchange.

Speaker 8 This might be the worst case scenario for Shane Hennen,

Speaker 8 is that you stitch on the record, you get everyone you were working with in trouble, and you get zero protection or immunity. You get charged yourself.

Speaker 8 Dare I say, Pablo, he might have to watch out for stitches.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 his very

Speaker 1 unprotected white ass

Speaker 1 might want to, you know, be a bit careful. That would be the implication of theory number two.

Speaker 1 And as we wait further developments in this docket, there are questions. I mean,

Speaker 1 and some of the outstanding questions in this enormous NBA nightmare relate to Malik Beasley. Because of course,

Speaker 1 Malik Beasley, you should know, happened to join the Lakers roster on February 9th, 2023.

Speaker 1 The same day that Lakers' assistant Damon Jones was allegedly texting inside information to, quote, get a big bet on Milwaukee tonight

Speaker 1 to an unidentified co-conspirator number nine, who was described in the indictment only as a resident of Brooklyn.

Speaker 1 Malik Beasley, you may now recall, is also the player that the cousin of of Amar Flappy Awade,

Speaker 1 a resident of Brooklyn, had been tweeting about months before the federal investigation into Beasley was ever mentioned in public.

Speaker 1 But months after Amar Flappy Awade had turned himself into the feds, joining the other charter members of that Jante Porter group chat.

Speaker 1 Only to very curiously not be named as a defendant in the government's NBA betting indictment when it got unsealed last week.

Speaker 1 Awade, by the way, was fighting the government's opposition to his bail heading into a hearing this Wednesday.

Speaker 1 And all of this is to say that multiple sources with direct knowledge tell Pablo Tore finds out that the federal government's investigation into Malik Beasley is still ongoing.

Speaker 1 two weeks into this NBA season, as Malik Beasley remains a frustrated free agent.

Speaker 1 Now, when asked about this, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office here in the Eastern District of New York told us, quote, no comment.

Speaker 1 But an official at the NBA league office tells us that Beasley is still

Speaker 1 also being investigated internally by the league's lawyers for betting activity, despite not finding any, quote, hard evidence of Beasley altering his performance or communicating with gamblers to tip his performances, end quote.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But the next question I needed to broach here takes us to Washington, D.C.,

Speaker 1 because members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and members of the Senate Committee on Commerce have written a pair of bipartisan letters demanding accountability from Commissioner Adam Silver.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 As Congresswoman Yvette Clark, the Democrat from New York on the House Committee, tells Pablo Torre finds out in a statement, quote, The recent federal indictments have called into question the integrity of the National Basketball Association.

Speaker 1 We will uncover the full scale of this scandal. If/slash 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.

Speaker 1 Silver directly, end quote.

Speaker 1 Meanwhile, in another exclusive statement to PTFO, the U.S.

Speaker 1 Democratic Senator from Hawaii, Brian Schatz, who sits on the Senate's committee, tells us, quote, recent allegations about gambling in the NBA need to be investigated thoroughly.

Speaker 1 Basketball fans and the broader public deserve to know the extent of this scandal. ⁇ End quote.

Speaker 1 And that is kind of all we're trying to do on this show as well. You know?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 14 Hoops, fellas.

Speaker 1 And speaking of, it's really hard for me to not think of the wise words spoken by a man

Speaker 1 with an almost remarkable lucidity

Speaker 1 about how sports betting, much like a federal investigation,

Speaker 1 Really is a long game.

Speaker 2 Everybody keeps saying, oh my gosh, Shane, you won a million dollars on the weekend, you won a million dollars on Sunday. Like, holy!

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So, that's why I'm saying: if anybody thinks there's sports betting, you got to just understand there's going to be highs and there's going to be lows.

Speaker 8 So, this is a low, right?

Speaker 1 That's correct. Oh,

Speaker 8 callback.

Speaker 1 This has been Pablo Torre finds out a Metalark media production

Speaker 1 and I'll talk to you next time.

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