A sports betting influencer, a Gotti family pal who served prison time for a notorious racist baseball bat beating and 10 others are expected to plead guilty to charges they helped run a rigged underground poker game with NBA players, according to a court filing in Brooklyn Tuesday.
The defendants, many of them with ties to the Mafia, including two made men, were charged in a blockbuster 31-suspect indictment last October accusing them of running illegal poker games across the country that used high-tech methods to cheat big-money gamblers out of millions.
Former Cleveland Cavaliers player and coach Damon Jones pleaded guilty to his role in the scheme in April, while charges are pending against another NBA star, Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups.
The pro ballers served as “face cards” to lure in high-rollers who wanted to play poker with NBA starts, the feds allege.
On Tuesday, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn asked the judge overseeing the case, U.S. District Court Judge Ramon Reyes, to schedule change-of-plea hearings for a dozen defendants in the case.
They include Shane “Sugar Shane” Hennen, a betting influencer with around 70,000 Instagram followers, and Nicholas “Fat Nick” Minucci, who was sentenced to 15 years behind bars for beating a Black man, Glenn Moore, with an aluminum baseball bat in Howard Beach as he yelled the N-word.
Minucci, who made a brief appearance on the reality show “Growing Up Gotti,” expressed his reverence for Gambino kingpin John Gotti in a conversation with the famed gangster’s grandson.
The poker game schemers drained $7 million from their would-be card sharp victims. They used an array of high-tech cheating devices, including a modified automatic card shuffler that predicted which player had the best hand and sent that data to an off-site operator, the feds allege.
That operator would send texts to the “quarterback” or “driver” at the table, who, in turn, would secretly signal to the other players how to bet.
The conspiracy also used an X-ray table to read cards when they were facedown, a poker chip tray with hidden cameras and even special contact lenses and glasses to read pre-marked cards, prosecutors said.
Hennen is also charged in NBA and NCAA game-rigging indictments, accused of conspiring with Jones, Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier and Toronto Raptors player Jontay Porter and others to fix games. Both Rozier and Porter’s NBA careers were derailed by sports betting scandals. Fellow influencer Marves “Vezino Locks” Fairley, who is not charged in the poker case, pleaded guilty to his role in the basketball game-rigging schemes in May.
