NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!
Two former NBA players turned coaches, one of whom is a Hall of Famer, were arrested Thursday after alleged involvement in a rigged poker scheme in which members of the La Cosa Nostra crime families were also listed as defendants.
Chauncey Billups and Damon Jones, the latter of whom is also a defendant in the sports betting case with Terry Rozier, were charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
The two are alleged to have knowingly taken part in rigged poker games, being dubbed “face cards,” which the Department of Justice said were “members of the Cheating Teams and received a portion of the criminal proceeds in exchange for their participation in the scheme.”
Lansky II added that there is a potential sense of power from the athletes themselves.
“I think anybody that gets an extraordinary amount of money, and they’ve got a lot of fans behind them, yeah, they can get to the point where they’re just blind to ‘Nothing can happen to me. Why don’t I just do this?’ I do think that with any background, not just sports. It’s a powerful thing. Money and power and fame, it takes over sometimes,” he said.
“Protection — you don’t have to come up with the front money, you place it with a bookie a lot of times. They’ll look for you if you don’t pay up, but you know, reasons like that, they have great control and great power. They have different ways they do things with somebody. They’re influential themselves when they talk to maybe a player. There’s an affiliation with the mafia and famous people and sports people, they like that connection sometimes. It gives them something. It’s a strong entity in our society, so that’s one of the reasons. They trust them, too.”
Lansky II will release a book, “The Lansky Legacy,” on Tuesday, where he is a co-author who tells “the truth” about his grandfather and nixes “a lot of misconceptions” about him.
Follow Fox News Digital’s sports coverage on X, and subscribe to the Fox News Sports Huddle newsletter.
The post Meyer Lansky II gives inside look at how athletes can get tied up with mafia: ‘It’s a strong entity’ appeared first on Fox News.
