James”Jimmy””Bah-Bah””The Sheep” Battista was a stressed-out, overweight, Oxy-addicted 41-year-old, at the hole to some underground gamblers for sums he’d sort of lost track of, even 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 ago, 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 match — an outrageous bargain. In case the pick won, the ref got his two dimes. If the choice missed, the ref owed nothing; Battista would eat the loss. A”free roster,” as they call it. But this referee didn’t lose much. His selections were winning at an 88% clip, totally unheard of in sports betting for any sustained period of time. They were now entering the sixth week of the scheme — what you might call a sustained time period.
Battista had understood the ref, Timmy Donaghy, for 25 decades. They had gone to the same parochial high school at the suburban areas of Delaware County, just outside Philadelphia — Delco, as it’s sometimes called — where the sports pubs are plentiful, where a certain easy familiarity with forms of gambling prevails, where guys have bookies like they have got dentists.
Battista was a creature of that planet. He was what is called a mover. Strictly speaking, movers are neither gamblers nor bookmakers. They’re a species of broker that supplies solutions to sports bettors, putting down wagers in their clients’ benefit with bookmakers of various sorts around the world, lawful and not. Battista was set well enough in that world that, without Donaghy’s understanding but predicated 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 basketball — a fund that he was now having to bet games officiated with this one NBA referee. One member of the group called it”the ticket” and”the company.”

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