Tim Donaghy spent thirteen seasons as an NBA referee, and by his own admission spent the last four of them betting on games he was working. On August 15, 2007, in federal court in Brooklyn, he pleaded guilty to two felonies — conspiracy to engage in wire fraud and transmitting wagering information across state lines. On July 29, 2008, U.S. District Judge Carol Bagley Amon sentenced him to 15 months in prison and three years of supervised release. The verdict on record is a criminal conviction and a prison term, which is why this file lands where it does.
The mechanism was less a thrown game than a leaking one. Donaghy did not, in the version the courts accepted, deliberately blow whistles to move a score. He sold something subtler: a referee’s privileged read on the night ahead — which crews called games tight, which stars were nursing injuries, which officials disliked which coaches. He coded those tips to a high-school friend turned middleman, who relayed them to a professional gambler. The picks were good enough that the crew kept paying for them, which is the only audit a betting market ever really runs.
He was caught not by the NBA, which had certified him as one of its better officials, but by accident. The FBI was running a broader organized-crime investigation when it stumbled across a sitting referee’s name, and the league learned of the problem at roughly the same time the public did, in July 2007. Commissioner David Stern called it the act of a “rogue, isolated criminal” — a characterization Donaghy would spend years trying to complicate, alleging that other referees carried biases and that the league nudged outcomes. An independent review found the conduct ugly but the conspiracy lonely.
What it cost the NBA was harder to price than his fifteen months: the single most corrosive thing a sport built on officiating can be told about itself is that one of the people holding the whistle had money on the result.
In the 1978–79 college basketball season, a Boston College forward named Rick Kuhn took money to keep his team from covering the point spread, and the men paying him included Henry Hill — the Lucchese crime family associate later immortalized in Goodfellas. The scheme came apart not because anyone watching the basketball noticed, but because Hill was arrested on unrelated drug charges in 1980, turned government witness, and offered the point-shaving operation as one item on a long menu of crimes he could describe. In 1981 a federal jury in Brooklyn convicted Kuhn, the gamblers Tony and Rocco Perla, Paul Mazzei, and the mobster James “Jimmy the Gent” Burke of conspiracy, sports bribery, and related charges. Kuhn was originally sentenced to ten years in prison, later reduced to 28 months. The verdict on record is a set of federal criminal convictions.
The plan was elegantly modest by the standards of crime. The conspirators did not want Boston College to lose — losing draws attention. They wanted the Eagles to win by less than the bookmakers expected. A team favored by twelve points needed only to win by eight, and a few quiet decisions by one or two players — a forced shot here, a lazy rotation there — could shave the margin without ever looking like a thrown game. Kuhn recruited at least one teammate, and the ring selected games where a wide spread gave them room to work.
What made the case famous was not the basketball but the company. Mazzei knew Hill from a federal prison stretch; Hill brought in Burke, the architect of the Lufthansa heist, to bankroll the bets and line up bookmakers. The fix was, in other words, financed by the same Lucchese-adjacent crew Martin Scorsese would later put on screen — which is how a modest college operation acquired its cinematic afterlife, and the nickname, courtesy of one of the gamblers, of “the worst fix ever.”
In the winter and summer of 1951, Manhattan District Attorney Frank Hogan dismantled the largest point-shaving conspiracy American sport had then seen. Players at City College of New York, Long Island University, NYU, Manhattan College, Bradley, Toledo, and even the reigning national champion Kentucky had taken cash from gamblers to control the margins of games — most of them played at Madison Square Garden, then the cathedral of college basketball. By the time Hogan closed the investigation in October 1951, around 35 players from seven schools had admitted fixing roughly 86 games over several seasons. Players, gamblers, and a professional referee were convicted. The verdict on record is a cascade of criminal convictions handed down chiefly by Judge Saul Streit, and the lasting casualty was the college game in New York itself.
The cruelest detail was the team at the center. CCNY’s 1949–50 Beavers had done something never done before or since: won both the NCAA tournament and the National Invitation Tournament in a single season, a citywide miracle for a free municipal college. Within a year, several of those same players were under arrest, having admitted they shaved points for money during the very season of their double championship. The heroes and the fixers turned out to be the same young men.
The mechanism was the now-familiar one — win by less than the spread, or lose a game you were favored to win, for a payment that dwarfed anything an unpaid student could otherwise earn. What set 1951 apart was scale and venue. The fixing was not one rogue team but an industry, organized by gamblers like the jeweler Salvatore Sollazzo and his former-player middleman Eddie Gard, operating around the Garden where the betting money concentrated. The scandal broke because one player, approached to join, refused and went to the police instead.