Reported by David Waldstein

(Excerpt shared below. To read full report, go to: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/25/nyregion/new-york-basketball-betting-scandals.html)

New York is known as the heart of the basketball world, but it could also be called the capital of basketball betting scandals. Less than a decade after the first N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament, college players in the city were already shaving points.

“New York has always been at the center for that kind of activity,” said Edward McDonald, a former federal prosecutor who uncovered the Boston College point-shaving scandal in 1980. “New York is the mecca for organized crime, and that is where a lot of it starts.”

From the sobering point-shaving scheme at the City College of New York in the 1940s and ’50s to this week’s accusations that N.B.A. stars were involved in a new betting scandal, many of the most infamous cases were threaded through gyms, bookmaking shops or law enforcement offices in New York, and sometimes all three.

On Thursday, the F.B.I. announced that it had made over 30 arrests in two gambling schemes, including one that linked an N.B.A. Hall of Famer, Chauncey Billups, to rigged illegal poker games held in Manhattan and run by the Mafia.