Last year, Jontay Porter received a lifetime ban from the NBA for violating the league’s gambling rules. The former Raptor had worked with bettors to purposefully remove himself from games with injuries in order to hit the unders on various prop bets in an effort to clear his own gambling debts.
They got caught because those bets were flagged by sportsbooks — in a shocking turn of events, Jontay Porter props suddenly getting hit with $20,000 bets raises some red flags — and a federal investigation uncovered Porter was in on the plan and was purposefully removing himself from game action. Porter has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, but on Sunday another co-conspirator was arrested at the Las Vegas airport, leading to further discovery being revealed in court documents.
In those documents, which were uncovered by Mike Vorkunov of The Athletic, it is revealed that Porter was not just in contact with the bettors, but at one point sent text messages to them during a Raptors game on January 22 to alert them that he wasn’t likely to play anymore while he got his eye examined (via Vorkunov).
This really has to be the easiest case to prosecute of all time because they all communicated via text message and explicitly laid out the crimes they were going to commit. We might need Charles Barkley to give an addendum to his “do not commit crimes with checks” advice to include not explaining the crimes you are committing in text form. Porter is still awaiting sentencing, and every update on this story makes it extremely clear that this was not exact Ocean’s 11 when it came to planning.
