A few years ago, LeBron James, as he does from time to time, lauded the accomplishments of a friend’s child on social media. That friend was Damon Jones, whose daughter had made the second-team all-district team for her high school basketball play.
“Yeeeaahhhhhhh niece!!! Congratulations!! First Team coming next!!!” Mr. James wrote.
It was one of many signs of the superstar’s friendship with Mr. Jones, to whom he has been close ever since they played together on the Cleveland Cavaliers from 2005 to 2008. Mr. Jones, a backup guard who started 10 games over those three seasons, has traveled the world with Mr. James and gotten jobs because of his connection to Mr. James, including as his personal shooting coach. According to federal prosecutors, that wasn’t the only way Mr. Jones may have benefited from his relationship with basketball’s biggest star.
On Thursday, federal officials announced that Mr. Jones had been indicted for his role in a sports gambling ring, and separately for his role in rigged poker games that involved Mafia members. The indictment said Mr. Jones used his friendship with an unnamed player (who matched the description of Mr. James), and his proximity to the N.B.A., to sell insider information to gamblers who then placed bets based on that information.
Mr. James has not been accused of wrongdoing.
Being friends with a professional athlete, especially as part of their entourage, has long been a kind of social currency. Beyond dates and V.I.P. access, it can open up networking opportunities with the rich and famous, and sometimes provide a fast track into careers that are otherwise difficult to break into.
And because of that, players are often warned about the dangers of letting the wrong people into their circles.
There are tales of family members stealing money from professional athletes, of friends using an athlete’s fame for personal gain. It is a phenomenon as old as professional sports.
But the rise of legal sports betting adds a complicated layer to the way members of a professional athlete’s inner circle can profit from their adjacency to a player, both with and without the player’s cooperation. Access that once offered mostly cachet can now be alchemized into edge, as gamblers call it.
The Lonely Life of the Superstar
It’s not uncommon for players to keep old friends and family close when they enter professional sports, particularly in the N.B.A. where some draft picks are 19 or 20 years old.
“Being rich alone is very boring; it’s very sad,” said Travonne Edwards, who was part of two different N.B.A. players’ entourages from 2006 to 2017. (One was a friend from childhood; the other he met through the first friend.) “Most people think money is everything, so you have to kind of pay for your friends to be around.”
Some of the league’s most prominent players can get longtime friends hired by their team. They often will bring coaches, trainers or security guards with them when they change teams. For example, Kawhi Leonard’s high school teammate, Jeremy Castleberry, has been on the coaching staff of all three of Mr. Leonard’s teams, the Spurs, Raptors and Clippers. Other times, even if a team hasn’t employed the person, the friend will have special privileges, like access to the locker room and team flights.
They run errands for the player, serve as drivers and sometimes even scout women for the players. (Yes, the television series “Entourage” had some truth to it.)
When the Minnesota Timberwolves drafted Kevin Garnett out of high school in 1995, he brought siblings, a girlfriend and friends he grew up with in South Carolina to live with him in Minnesota, according to an April 2002 article in Sports Illustrated. The piece quoted an unnamed coach saying, “Sometimes I could swear that the entourages have entourages.”
Mr. James is proud of the fact that he has kept the same people close for decades and that he is an position to help friends he thinks have promise. Two of his old friends, Maverick Carter and Rich Paul, used the head start given by their connection to Mr. James to become well-respected forces on their own.
Mr. Carter is known for his marketing savvy; he co-founded an entertainment company, the SpringHill Group, with Mr. James and manages Mr. James’s business ventures. Mr. Paul is now one of the most powerful agents in the N.B.A., representing players including Anthony Davis in addition to Mr. James. (And now that Mr. Paul is in a relationship with Adele, Mr. James is arguably no longer the most famous superstar in his life.)
“When it’s an athlete helping somebody that’s actually capable of doing the work, it’s looked at a certain way,” Mr. Paul said in an interview with The New York Times two years ago. “But corporate America,” he added, has been “hiring a nephew or niece or somebody’s son for years.”
But this is not the trajectory of all the people who surround players.
“That’s why you’ve got stories of ‘My mom stole from me, or my cousin, my best friend,’” Mr. Edwards said. “And also there’s financial things, and there’s an obligation of ‘Hey, I’m your Day One. Why wouldn’t you take care of me?’”
Players do sometimes take care of those friends financially. And now, they may do so in a new way, intentionally or not.
Little bits of information that come up naturally in conversation may have seemed like throwaway details in the past can lead to windfalls of thousands of dollars: Whether a player will sit out a game next week. How their ankle is feeling, which could affect their minutes and their statistics.
This is thanks in part to the advent of prop bets, wagers on events during a game rather than the outcome of the game, and the easy access of gambling on a phone in most states.
‘You Are Liable’
The N.B.A. requires teams to instruct players about the dangers of gambling, including warnings about sharing information with friends. Steve Kerr, the head coach of the Golden State Warriors, said in a pregame news conference on Thursday that his team met with its legal counsel earlier in the week to make sure they understood the rules in advance of the new season.
“A big part of that meeting was: You tell one of your friends that so-and-so’s not playing, and then that person tells somebody else, you are liable,” Mr. Kerr said.
It’s not just friends who have that access; there are scores of people who work for N.B.A. teams who might catch whiff of a star nursing an injury and would have the ability to tip off a bettor.
Players may not always be unwitting victims.
The federal case announced Thursday said that Terry Rozier of the Miami Heat actively helped his childhood friend, Deniro Laster, make money off bets using insider information. Mr. Rozier’s lawyer has denied wrongdoing.
But the details of the indictment highlight family connections and longstanding relationships.
Prosecutors said Mr. Laster sold, for tens of thousands of dollars, information that Mr. Rozier planned to leave a game early on March 23, 2023. An unnamed co-conspirator, described as a relative of Mr. Laster, financed a bet that Mr. Laster placed on Mr. Rozier’s play.
After the bets were paid, Mr. Laster is said to have gone to Philadelphia to collect his cut. The indictment claims Mr. Laster then met Mr. Rozier at his home in Charlotte, N.C., where the two counted the money together.
Just a few days before the indictment was unsealed, Mr. Laster went to his X account (where his bio reads, in part, “Beat the Odds”) to endorse a post about Mr. Rozier’s upcoming “bounce back season.” “No Bap,” he wrote, slang for truth.
Tania Ganguli writes about money, power and influence in sports and how it impacts the broader culture.
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