James »Jimmy » »Bah-Bah » »The Sheep » Battista was a stressed-out, obese, Oxy-addicted 41-year-old, in the pit to some underground gamblers for amounts 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 audacious: He had sat down and cut a deal with an NBA referee. Now he feared the scheme had become too obvious.
« You want get compensated? » Battista had stated to the ref. « Then you have ta pay the f–ing spread. » The bribe was only two dimes, $2,000 per game — an outrageous deal. If the pick won, the ref got his two dimes. If the choice missed, 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, entirely unheard of in sports gambling for any sustained time period. They’re now entering the first week of the plot — what you might call a sustained time period.
Battista had understood the ref, Timmy Donaghy, for 25 years. They had gone to the exact same parochial high school at the working-class Catholic neighborhoods of Delaware County, just outside Philadelphia — Delco, since it’s sometimes called — where the sports pubs are abundant, where a particular easy familiarity with forms of betting prevails, where men have bookies like they’ve got dentists.
Battista was a monster of that planet. He was what’s called a mover. Strictly speaking, movers are gamblers nor bookmakers. They are a species of broker that supplies services to sports bettors, putting down wagers on their clients’ benefit with bookmakers of various sorts around the Earth, legal and not. Battista was positioned well in that world which, without Donaghy’s knowledge but based on Donaghy’s picks, he’d helped set up a kind of loose, disorderly hedge fund. Several people from the sports-betting underworld had, in consequence, staked Battista a basketball — a fund that he was now using to bet on games officiated with this one NBA referee. 1 member of the team called it »the ticket » and »the company. »
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