James»Jimmy»»Bah-Bah»»The Sheep» Battista was a stressed-out, obese, Oxy-addicted 41-year-old, in the pit to a underground gamblers for sums he’d sort of lost track of, when he settled in to watch an NBA game for which he thought he would simply put in the correct. It was January 2007. A month or so ago, long before Christmas, he’d done something adventuresome: He’d sat down and cut a deal with an NBA referee. Now he feared that the scheme had become too obvious.
«You want get compensated?» Battista had said to the ref. «Then you gotta cover the f–ing spread» The bribe was only two dimes, $2,000 per match — an outrageous deal. In case the pick won, the ref got his two dimes. In case the pick missed, then the ref owed nothing; Battista would eat the loss. A»free roll,» as they call it. But this referee did not lose much. His selections were winning at an 88% clip, totally unheard of sports gambling for any sustained time period. They were now entering the sixth week of the plot — what you might call a sustained period of time.
Battista had understood the ref, Timmy Donaghy, for 25 decades. They had gone to the same parochial high school in the working-class Catholic areas of Delaware County, just outside Philadelphia — Delco, since it’s sometimes called — where the sports bars are abundant, where a particular easy familiarity with forms of gambling prevails, where guys have bookies like they’ve got dentists.
Battista was a creature of that planet. He was what’s called a mover. Strictly speaking, movers are neither gamblers nor bookmakers. They are a species of broker that provides solutions to sports bettors, laying down wagers on their customers’ benefit with bookmakers of various types around the world, lawful and not. Battista was set well in that world which, without Donaghy’s understanding but predicated on Donaghy’s picks, he’d helped set up a sort of loose, disorderly hedge fund. Several people from the sports-betting underworld had, in effect, staked Battista a basketball — a fund that he was now using to bet games officiated by this one NBA referee. 1 member of this team called it»the ticket» and»the company.»

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