Terry Rozier, a veteran guard currently under contract with the Miami Heat, and Chauncey Billups, a basketball Hall of Famer and the Portland Trail Blazers head coach who is under an indefinite suspension, are due to appear before federal judges for status updates in their cases, beginning with Rozier’s scheduled appearance in a Brooklyn courtroom today, The Athletic reported. Billiups is reportedly due in court on Wednesday.
Rozier and Billups are the most famous names among more than 30 people charged last year with a range of gambling-related offenses. The accused include associates of La Cosa Nostra, otherwise known as the Mafia. The allegations range from using pro athletes to lure marks into rigged, high-stakes poker games to NBA players giving inside information to help bettors cash in on so-called prop bets, which are wagers on individual player stats or other factors besides the win-loss outcome of a game.
The Justice Department said last year that Billups and former NBA player Damon Jones, along with associates and made members of the Bonanno, Genovese, and Gambino crime families, conspired to defraud players in rigged poker games. The athletes, the Feds charge, were the “Face Cards” that lured gamblers to backroom poker games where rigged technology, from janky card shuffling machines to special contact lenses that could read the backs of cards, was used to cheat players out of tens of millions of dollars.
Jones was also charged along with Rozier in a separate case in which the government alleges that they “turned professional basketball into a criminal betting operation” by giving away insider info to gamblers, who then placed bets that relied on the intel.
Neither Billups nor Rozier has had a court date since last year; all of the accused athletes have pleaded not guilty to the charges against them. No trial dates have been set. As ESPN reported early last month, an arbitrator ruled that the NBA must pay Rozier his roughly $26.6 million salary for this season, despite the ongoing investigation.
The NBA and Heat had escrowed his salary, but the league’s players’ union appealed and won.