When will college basketball have its Jontay Porter moment?
It's only a matter of time. Plus: Mike Woodson still really likes two bigs!
“Catch Me If You Can” is one of the best late-career Steven Spielberg films. Beyond being fascinating and beautiful, it is also airy and calm, the work of a master so totally in control of his craft that it doesn’t feel like he even has to try to make something this good — he just sort of shows up and it happens. (“Bridge of Spies” feels like this, too.) Spielberg’s effortless direction is a good frame for the story of Frank Abagnale, Jr., who, at least in the film version, spent his teenage years forging documents, creating new identities and free money out of thin air, traveling the world, and pretending to be a doctor, a lawyer, and commercial pilot in the process.
Abagnale was an especially gifted forger of checks. He used to carry them around as he pretended to be a Pan-Am big shot, and so maybe it’s just a function of having a movie-poisoned brain, but this was the first thing that came to mind when the latest on the Jontay Porter betting scandal broke Tuesday evening:
Long Phi Pham, 38, also known as “Bruce,” was nabbed (with a bag stuffed with $12,000 cash, two cashier checks worth $80,000 and several betting slips) Monday while trying to board a flight from John F. Kennedy International Airport to Australia on a one-way ticket, according to a complaint filed in Brooklyn federal court.
He is accused of working with Jontay Porter, 24, to place “prop bets.” …
Federal prosecutors allege that Porter had racked up large gambling debts in the beginning of the year to co-conspirators, and was encouraged to clear those debts by throwing games in order for certain bets to hit.
In this case, Porter, a journeyman between the Raptors and their G-League affiliate, allegedly told Pham that he was going to take himself out early from the Jan. 26 game against the Los Angeles Clippers, claiming he was injured, the feds said.
Pham, with his bag full of cash and checks and his one way ticket out of the country, is just one of four people the Department of Justice charged in connection with the gambling that got Porter permanently banned from the NBA. On April 4, shortly after Porter learned that he was under investigation, he texted the four defendants via Telegram saying they “might just get hit w a rico” and asking everyone if they deleted their phones, per the DOJ complaint.
Criminal masterminds, these were not. (Though three of the four defendants remain at large, so maybe they’ll succeed where Pham failed, who knows.) But it doesn’t take criminal masterminds to place bets, or to cook up something so hare-brained as Porter telegraphing a prop bet in which he gets himself taken out of a game so he can hit his statistical unders, for it to be life-ruiningly illegal for the parties involved. It’s one of the most obvious things in the world, actually, so obvious that most players would never attempt it — except, maybe, for people that mess around and mess up and get themselves into massive gambling debt they don’t think they have a way out of.
College players are more vulnerable to this than most pros, maybe precisely as vulnerable as Porter was. It feels like disaster is only a matter of time.
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