A man accused of conspiring with an N.B.A. player to bet on basketball games was sent to jail on Tuesday after prosecutors said he had posted an emoji of a rat on Instagram to intimidate witnesses in the case.
Mob films have popularized the rat as a symbol of the reviled government informant. In Brooklyn federal court on Tuesday, prosecutors said the post was part of a striking pattern by the man, De’Niro Laster, to intimidate witnesses and obstruct justice. Prosecutors said Mr. Laster had learned about statements that anonymous witnesses had made to the government.
Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall, who is overseeing the case, said the connotation of the emoji was clear and revoked Mr. Laster’s bail. David I. Berman, a federal prosecutor, characterized Mr. Laster’s conduct as “utterly egregious.”
Mr. Laster, who is facing charges related to insider trading on sports bets, had been out on bond since he was charged in October 2025. According to federal prosecutors, he conspired with his close friend, the N.B.A. player Terry Rozier, to wager that Mr. Rozier would underperform in several key statistical categories during a basketball game in March 2023.
After collecting the winnings, prosecutors say, Mr. Laster drove from Pennsylvania to Mr. Rozier’s home in North Carolina, where they counted the cash. Both men have pleaded not guilty to all charges.
In addition to posting the rat emoji, prosecutors say Mr. Laster spoke with a co-defendant, who was not named, advising him not to cooperate with the government. Prosecutors say Mr. Laster also tried to obstruct justice while he was under federal investigation in September 2024, before he was indicted.
It is not clear when a rat first came to refer to a person perceived to be a traitor, though its usage is splattered across politics and popular culture, particularly in depictions of organized crime.
President Trump infamously referred to Michael Cohen, his former lawyer and fixer, as a “rat.” In the final scene of “The Departed,” a Martin Scorsese film depicting turncoats embedded in both the Irish mob and the Boston Police Department, a rat scurries across a balcony, a thinly veiled reference to deceit.
M. Evan Corcoran, a lawyer for Mr. Laster, suggested that the emoji, which he also called “rat cartoons,” was harmless. He said it would be a “manifest injustice” to jail Mr. Laster.
“Sometimes a rat emoji is just a rat emoji,” Mr. Corcoran said.
While conducting legal research, Judge DeArcy Hall said she had found other instances of judges imposing harsher sentences on defendants who were found to refer to government witnesses as “rats.”
She did not buy Mr. Corcoran’s argument.
“Am I to just treat this rat emoji as innocuous?” Judge DeArcy Hall asked Mr. Corcoran. “Is that your argument? Because if it is, it’s a bad one.”
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