The Detroit Pistons and Dallas Mavericks trained at the Arena CDMX in Mexico City on the eve of their regular season NBA game in the Mexican capital.
The two teams meet at the start of a season still rocking by Chauncey Billups, an NBA Hall of Fame player and head coach of the Portland Trail Blazers, and Terry Rozier, a guard with the Miami Heat, being among more than 30 people charged in connection with two separate but related federal gambling investigations that involved the league and the Mafia.
The schemes - one of them focused on insider sports betting and another that rigged poker games nationwide - spanned years and involved tens of millions of dollars in illicit gains from wire fraud, money laundering, extortion and gambling, FBI Director Kash Patel told a press conference on October 23.
Rozier was one of several National Basketball Association insiders who allegedly provided non-public information about upcoming games to their criminal partners, who in turn used straw bettors to place multiple bets based on the tips, authorities said.
Billups was charged in a separate case with helping to rig poker games to defraud unknowing players lured to the games with the promise of playing against celebrities. The defendants employed sophisticated technology to fix the games in New York, Las Vegas, Miami and elsewhere, including fraudulent card shufflers and x-ray tables.
That scheme also involved the Bonanno, Gambino, Lucchese and Genovese organized crime families in New York, which controlled some of the underground poker games in the city where the rigging took place. The families took a cut of the profits, used extortion and robbery to collect unpaid debts and laundered proceeds through cryptocurrency and other means, according to prosecutors.
While the arrests stemmed from two separate indictments, a handful of defendants were charged in both cases, including former Cleveland Cavaliers player and assistant coach Damon Jones.
Mexico City hosts one of just three international regular season games with the Memphis Grizzlies and Orlando Magic facing off in Berlin on January 15 next year, before meeting again in London three days later.
(Production: Diego Delgado, Stefan Haskins, Conal Quinn)