James”Jimmy””Bah-Bah””The Sheep” Battista was a stressed-out, overweight, Oxy-addicted 41-year-old, in the hole to some underground gamblers for sums he’d sort of lost track of, even when he settled in to watch an NBA game for which he believed he’d just put in the correct. It was January 2007. A month or so back, long before Christmas, he’d done something adventuresome: He had sat down and cut a deal with an NBA referee. Now he feared the scheme had become too obvious.
“You wanna get paid?” Battista had said to the ref. “Then you gotta cover the f–ing spread.” The bribe was only two dimes, $2,000 per game — an outrageous deal. If the choice won, the ref got his two dimes. In case the pick missed, the ref owed nothing; Battista would eat the reduction. A”free roster,” as they call it. However, this referee didn’t lose much. His selections were winning at an 88 percent clip, totally unheard of sports betting for any sustained period of time. They were now entering the first week of the scheme — what you could call a sustained period of time.
Battista had understood the ref, Timmy Donaghy, for 25 years. They’d gone to the exact same parochial high school in the suburban areas of Delaware County, just outside Philadelphia — Delco, as it’s sometimes called — where the sports bars are plentiful, where a certain easy familiarity with forms of betting prevails, where guys have bookies like they have got dentists.
Battista was a creature of that world. He was what is called a mover. Strictly speaking, movers are gamblers nor bookmakers. They are a species of agent that provides solutions to sports bettors, laying down wagers on their customers’ behalf with bookmakers of various sorts around the Earth, lawful and not. Battista was set well enough in that world which, without Donaghy’s knowledge but predicated on Donaghy’s picks, he had helped put up a sort of loose, disorderly hedge fund. Several people from the sports-betting underworld had, in effect, staked Battista a basketball — a fund that he was now having to bet games officiated by this one NBA referee. One member of this team called it”the ticket” and”the company.”
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