Games tim donaghy fixed

See our ethics statement. More than a decade after Tim Donaghy was sentenced for conspiracy and wire fraud, the disgraced NBA official is back in the news. Last week, ESPN published an in-depth report detailing allegations that Donaghy not only tipped off gamblers with insider information, but also most likely made in-game calls with the intention of fixing the point spreads of games he officiated. Donaghy favored the side that attracted more betting dollars in 23 of those 30 competitive games, or 77 percent of the time.

In four games, he called the game neutrally, The number of games in which Tim Donaghy favored the team that attracted fewer betting dollars? And they are. Though it is universally accepted that disgraced former NBA referee Tim Donaghy bet on NBA games that he referred in, the long-held stance by both Donaghy and the league itself was that Donaghy didn't physically fix the games or work to alter the outcomes with his calls.

However, that might not actually be the case. An in-depth investigation recently released by ESPN suggests that Donaghy did indeed fix games and use his whistle to alter outcomes. From ESPN :. Battista is one of the gamblers the former NBA referee plead guilty to conspiring with.

Howard Beck of the New York Times writes :. Given their startling success in picking games, Gumbel asks Battista in the interview if he thinks that Donaghy fixed games. Donaghy has paid his debt to society, but has never been charged with actually fixing NBA games. This is the one topic on which the NBA and Donaghy agree. The FBI, likewise, has supported the notion that Donaghy did not fix games. The referee's life has its contradictions.

In-season, it is demanding, tiring, high stress. But the gig is well-paid -- even rookies in could make six figures. And then there's the offseason. By many accounts, it's like semi-retirement. In , Donaghy joined a country club in West Chester, Pennsylvania, called Radley Run, along whose fairways the Donaghys built a spacious home.

At the club he developed a circle of golfing pals. They played 18 holes four or five days a week. There was golfing but also drinking and gambling. Frequent excursions were made to the Borgata, a casino in Atlantic City. In the casino, Donaghy wore a baseball cap low to hide his eyes; everyone knows about the cameras in casinos, and the NBA forbade any gambling by its refs with the exception, oddly, of horse racing.

Infrequently, Donaghy was at home. Probably Donaghy's closest friend in this crowd was a man named Jack Concannon. They'd known each other since high school. Like many in their cohort, Concannon had a bookie, Peter Ruggieri, who also golfed frequently with Donaghy and Concannon's crew. Short, squat, thick-necked, Ruggieri was built, some thought, like a small rhinoceros. In spheres other than the country-club set, he went by the nickname Rhino.

Donaghy has written that Rhino had a handicapping system for picking NFL and college football winners. In October , Donaghy and Concannon decided to pool their money and wager on Ruggieri's picks. Concannon declined comment for this story. This was a clear violation of NBA rules, but Donaghy got over it.

Then, at some point in , Donaghy and Concannon crossed the Rubicon. According to Donaghy's account, the two were sitting alone in the Radley clubhouse after a round of golf when they decided to bet the NBA. But it wasn't just the NBA; according to court documents, they decided to bet on Donaghy's own games. Perhaps the greatest is this: that Donaghy was the ref who colluded with gamblers on NBA games for one disgraceful season.

That is incorrect. According to a court document, Donaghy and Concannon placed their first bet on a game Donaghy was refereeing in March -- more than four years and four NBA seasons before he was caught. He started small. In that first March, he bet on only two or three games.

The next season, though, the volume rose sharply -- he made between 30 and 40 wagers on games he worked. Same with the season after that and the season after that. He did well. By Donaghy's own admission in his memoir, so much cash started rolling in that he had problems knowing physically where to stash it so his wife wouldn't start asking questions.

Today, Kim Donaghy lives in Sarasota, Florida, where she and her then-husband and four daughters moved in Kim filed for divorce in late , a few months after the scandal became public. When I visited her in Sarasota not long ago, at the office where she works, she made it clear the divorce was a long time coming.

He was always locked in a room, on the phone. In Sarasota, Kim Donaghy printed out for me the first 98 pages of her unfinished and unpublished memoir, The Ref's Wife. In it, she writes of the paradox of being both "lonely for him" and "truly afraid of him. With her thumbs and forefingers, she made an "O" the diameter of an orange. She struggled to recall exactly when, but she told me she probably started finding the cash in , during the season.

At the time, she told herself the money was from golf-course betting. But she would keep finding such rolls in his pockets as the years went on. When I asked, she said she never counted the money, never confronted him about its existence. A high roller named Mike Rinnier, who'd made his fortune in Delaware County supermarkets, decided to bankroll a small sports-betting syndicate in the s.

He staffed it with working-class Delco kids ambitious to earn. Battista, who'd drifted as a bartender, restaurant manager and small-time hustler after high school, was in his early 20s when, according to Gaming the Game , a book about the Donaghy scandal by former Philly police detective Sean Patrick Griffin, Rinnier recruited him to join the group.

By chance, over the years its members had all acquired animal nicknames: Tiger, Rooster, Rhino, Seal, Sheep. And so their syndicate came to be known by some as the Animals. In the early s, the sports-betting world was undergoing its own equivalent of a dot-com boom. Black-market street bookies from all over the U. It was situated in a house a block off the beach. And it was there, in fall -- between beers under palms at the Mambo Beach tiki bar, between rounds of golf and late-night poker sessions at the Holiday Beach hotel's casino -- that the Animals began to cash in on one brilliant discovery.

Rhino Ruggieri was booking bets made by an acquaintance from back home, a guy he knew from the golf course named Jack Concannon. Back in Philly, Ruggieri had noticed that Concannon's bet sizes were an order of magnitude higher on certain NBA games. And those bets won -- won like Concannon had never won before. And normally this guy lost.

But suddenly this recreational dumb-money insurance salesman was putting five dimes each on select NBA games and beating the bookies? There had to be a pattern.

They'd studied his wagers. It hadn't taken long to deduce. Because he was a sometime member of the same golfing circle back home, Ruggieri knew that Concannon and NBA ref Tim Donaghy were friends. They checked the games. Who were the referees? Sure enough, there he was. One of the three was always him. Fing Donaghy. Holy s! Donaghy and Concannon are betting on Donaghy's games -- and making a goddamn killing. So what do you do when you stumble upon a possible criminal conspiracy in progress?

Large sums but, if handled deftly, not large enough to alert the broader market that something screwy might be going on. They had possibly just stumbled on the ultimate edge. They now had one job: Do not lose the edge by letting the information leak. Whether Donaghy was using his whistle to fix games was beside the point.

When Donaghy reffed and Concannon bet, the side he bet was covering the spread between 60 and 70 percent of the time. The Animals went so far as to study the box scores after each of Donaghy's outings.

That was obvious. Said another: "Did I assume he was fixing the games? Yeah, I did. But I didn't give a s, because it was great information. From to , we didn't miss a game. Any game that he reffed we had a wager on. Battista had since decided to set up shop on his own as a bet broker. Whatever his issue was, Battista said he couldn't talk about it over the phone.

A decade later, in the break room of the hair salon he worked in, Martino told me how it had gone: Martino had already known that their mutual buddy Tim Donaghy had been betting on his own NBA games with Concannon, and winning those bets.

Battista, after discovering this, had been following those bets for the better part of the past four years. But now, when Battista arrived at Martino's house, he dropped the bomb.

The big problem, Battista said, was that the betting markets appeared to be getting wise to the emergence of an astonishingly accurate NBA handicapper. Because this edge, this treasure, was in danger of evaporating, Battista had decided that he needed to assume direct control over the referee. Martino was not a gambler, had hardly ever placed a bet in his life.

But he'd remained close friends after high school with both Donaghy and Battista, who, in turn, were never that close with each other. Martino, in that way, was about to become the unlikely bridge upon which the conspiracy would travel. To Martino, Battista seemed desperate, even frightened.

And it was there, in the otherwise vacant dining area, seated around a table, that Battista and Donaghy, with Martino witnessing, consummated their deal. Much later on he would come to call this meeting "the marriage. Accounts of the meeting differ.

According to statements Donaghy made to federal law enforcement, Battista's deal was effectively an act of extortion. You don't want anyone "from New York" coming to your house, Battista told him. According to Battista, though, it was Donaghy who reached out, asking for a meeting. Both Battista and Martino have said that there were no threats, that everyone was nervous but the situation seemed copacetic, and that what sold Donaghy on the deal was Battista saying to him: We know you're giving the games to Jack Concannon.

And then, twisting the knife, Battista told him how much Concannon was winning. Donaghy rose from the table. He had to use the bathroom, he said, and motioned for Martino to please come along. It got out to Battista that I'm giving games to Jack! But no.

You know what he says? He goes: 'Do you believe it? Back at the table, Martino and Donaghy told Battista that they needed to drive to a nearby gas station. They came out of the station bearing a packet of rolling papers, and right there inside the car, under the fluorescent gas station lights, in the rental-return sprawl adjacent to the Philadelphia International Airport runway, Martino rolled a joint.

They passed it back and forth -- Battista, who'd snorted some coke earlier, demurred -- and as the car filled with smoke, they made, Martino told me, "a pact. Because that's how you get in trouble. The Celtics played the 76ers the night after the Marriott meeting. Donaghy worked the game. It was his first pick for Battista. The Celtics, favored by 2. We had a big bet on every fing game. Making bets at the highest levels of sports gambling is akin to the trading of any financial instrument.

There's a defined trading session. It opens in the morning and closes right before tip-off. It's possible, in effect, to buy and sell bets, to go long or go short, to hedge. The best movers spend years compiling vast networks of clients and "outs," or counterparties, with whom the movers can trade. Battista had such a network. It's possible, through Don Best Sports, a betting information service, to pull the line-movement data for individual NBA games going back years.

It's like looking at a stock chart. The data chronicle price fluctuations. If the spread widens during the trading session, then you know that demand among gamblers for betting on the favorite has intensified. And indeed, the chart for the Boston-Philly game on Dec.

Huge bets on Boston in the middle of the trading session, between a. In the NBA markets, betting experts say, any move of 1. The night after the Boston victory, according to all parties, the conspirators met once more, at Martino's house in the Philly suburb of Boothwyn. From here on out, Battista said, he and Donaghy would never communicate directly.

Instead, Martino would be in the middle. They would use, per Martino's statement to the FBI, a code.