By MIKE VORKUNOV The Athletic
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Four men went to a New Jersey casino in March 2024, at the start of the men’s NCAA Tournament.

While most of the attention in the sports world was on a pair of games in Dayton, Ohio, that would decide which teams would get the final spots in the round of 64, the men were focused on a forgettable NBA game, the Toronto Raptors hosting the Sacramento Kings. They were ready to make what they believed to be the surest bets of their lives.

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Around 6:30 p.m. on that Wednesday, according to legal filings, one of those men, Mahmud Mollah, took cash in a blue bag and transferred it into his account with the casino, then made more than $100,000 in wagers on prop bets for Jontay Porter, a little-known center with the Raptors. Mollah’s bets all wagered that Porter would not reach the points, rebounds and assists thresholds the casino had set for him in that game.

Putting that much money on a little-known NBA player might have seemed risky, but Mollah and the other men were confident in the outcome: They had been talking directly with Porter for months. He had given them an assurance before the game that he would take himself out early and claim he was ill. This sequence of events, and other details of the scheme, are based on legal filings made by the Justice Department in three cases over the past year.

According to law enforcement officials, it was not the first time Porter had faked a medical issue to remove himself from a game and depress his stats, and they said he had been keeping the four men aware of his intentions in a Telegram chat. When Porter told the men that he would come out early from a Jan. 26, 2024, game with an eye injury, Timothy McCormack bet $7,000 on a parlay that Porter would not hit his totals for points, rebounds, assists and 3-pointers. He won $40,250. A relative of one of the other men won $85,000.

Two months later at the DraftKings Sportsbook in Atlantic City, New Jersey, according to court records, the men again bet heavily on the under on Porter’s props; Porter played just two minutes and 43 seconds and finished with no points, no assists and two rebounds.

That would be the men’s last attempt to profit off Porter’s play. The wagers, which would have netted Mollah and others more than $1 million in winnings, raised suspicions with DraftKings, which suspended Mollah’s account and reported the wagers.

Since last year, the FBI has been investigating what prosecutors say is a scheme to fix the play of professional athletes in order to win wagers on their performances. The investigation has so far led to charges for six people, and four of them have already pleaded guilty, including Mollah, McCormack and Porter, who pleaded to one count of wire fraud conspiracy. The others are believed to be in plea negotiations, based on legal filings made by the federal government.

But the investigation has led to what may become one of the most far-reaching scandals to hit sports in decades. The Athletic spoke with more than a dozen people in different corners of the NBA, college sports and betting worlds, including people briefed on the investigation and people with expertise on the wide-ranging intersections between casinos and sports teams. Many of the people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the investigation or because they feared retribution or professional consequences for speaking publicly. A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York declined to comment.

The Porter case is also linked to investigations into match-fixing across college sports, people with knowledge of the situation said, and five schools are being investigated by the federal government for their possible ties to the scheme. Alarms were raised when unnatural betting action moved the line on a conference tournament game between Temple and Alabama-Birmingham in March 2024; federal law enforcement is looking at whether the same group of bettors can be tied to unusual line movement for other college basketball teams this season as well.

The federal investigation has cast a cloud over college sports and the legalized gambling industry. It is the largest conspiracy case yet since sports gambling was legalized for most of the country seven years ago.

Porter has already been banned from the NBA for not only manipulating his own stats during Raptors games, but also betting on the NBA and Raptors games via another person’s gambling account. Though Porter never played in a Raptors game he bet on, an NBA investigation found that he did bet on the team to lose in a parlay bet. The NBA, like other professional sports leagues, does not allow players to bet on their own sport.

Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier reportedly is also under federal investigation after a game in March 2023, when he was still with the Charlotte Hornets, was flagged by an integrity monitoring company for potentially abnormal betting behavior.

The NBA investigated Rozier and cleared him of any wrongdoing, a league spokesperson said.

Gambling industry veterans claim that match-fixing of some sort has always been a part of sports, but it never has been as potentially identifiable as it is now because of the legalization and pervasiveness of sports gambling, with is available in 38 states. Sportsbooks, leagues, regulators and betting integrity monitors all closely watch wagers for hints of impropriety.

That has led to bans for players in two professional sports — the NBA and MLB — as well as suspensions in the NFL for a violation of the league’s gambling policy. An MLB umpire was fired after he shared a gambling account with a professional poker player and refused to cooperate with the league’s investigation.

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said it is easier now to keep tabs on potential illicit behavior in and around the game, much like how insider trading is monitored.

“We now have the ability, as opposed to the old days before there was widespread legalized sports betting, to be heavily into the analytics of every game, looking at any blip, anything that’s unusual,” Silver said.

He added: “In terms of my faith in the future, human beings are fallible; I don’t want to suggest that we have a perfect system and there aren’t going to be any players that violate the rules. I certainly have absolutely no basis sitting here today to say there are multiple NBA players involved in anything inappropriate.”

When Porter was banned in May, it was a shocking moment across the sports world, as the first high-level ramification of its embrace of legalized sports gambling over the past decade. Now, the question is how far that scheme ultimately spread.

Although the full scope of the investigation is unknown, it has come at a crucial time. Legalized sports gambling, still only 7 years old in the United States outside of a few states, is trying to legitimize itself.

The sports world has never been closer to gambling, and it now has a high-profile scandal that could rip into its credibility if more names come out and more games are known to have been involved.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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