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CHAPTER 1

Ba Ba and the Black Sheep

Tommy Martino drove a Lotus. So when he pulled up to the curb behind the wheel of a four-door Honda that night, I had a bad feeling. It was December 12, 2006, and I had been patiently waiting for Tommy in front of the Philadelphia Marriott near the airport. Reaching for the front passenger door, I glanced through the window and laid eyes on the last guy in the world I wanted to see. There he was, James “Ba Ba” Battista, flashing me a crooked smile that could only mean one thing: trouble.

Like Tommy and I, Ba Ba was a student more than 20 years ago at Cardinal O’Hara High School in Springfield, Pennsylvania. Ba Ba played football with my older brother Jim and with Tommy’s brother Johnny. Back in those days, Ba Ba thought he was a big tough guy, always lifting weights and wearing tight shirts that showed off his pecs; I thought he was kind of goofy, a cartoon character who was constantly flexing his muscles. Ba Ba never saw a mirror he didn’t like. We were both Catholic school guys in small-town Pennsylvania and always friendly to each other, but I never considered him my friend. As a matter of fact, I thought I was better than he was. Better family, better looks, better athlete, better future. Little did I know that one day our names would be linked and that we would wear the same badge of dishonor for the rest of our lives.

By contrast, Tommy was a true friend whom I maintained contact with over the years. He was the quintessential mob-guy wannabe, always dressed to the hilt with perfectly groomed black hair, a dark Mediterranean complexion, and flashy jewelry. Only 5’4”, he may have been slight of stature but he walked tall with style and confidence. Tommy had a heart of gold and a knack for being hilariously funny. And as for the women, he always wore the best-looking girls on his arm. It was hard not to like Tommy.

Although I stayed in touch with Tommy, I hadn’t seen Ba Ba in years. I knew that Ba Ba was a bookie and a professional gambler; Tommy had told me that much. Apparently, Ba Ba was doing very well—a nice house, wife, and kids. Tommy, on the other hand, had a job as a computer technician at a local bank. He never went to college, but he was a smart guy and a straight shooter. At least that’s what I thought.


Since graduation, I had been pursuing my passion officiating basketball, and in 1994 I made it all the way to the top: I became a referee in the National Basketball Association. That same year, Tommy called me at my home in Havertown, Pennsylvania. “Ba Ba wants to talk to you,” he said. By then Ba Ba was heavily into gambling, a guy who in his own words “makes bets, places bets, and moves money.” He considered himself a professional money mover, and he actually listed his occupation as “professional gambler” on his tax forms.

“Why does he want to talk to me?” I asked cautiously.

“Are you gonna be on the up and up with the NBA games?” he asked me. In other words, would I be willing to give Tommy and Ba Ba inside information on how the games were going to come out?

I was enraged and demanded that Tommy get Battista on the phone. “Don’t ever call me again,” I warned him. “I’ll turn you in.”

They backed off, and a dozen years went by before Tommy raised the subject again. By 2006, Battista had become a high-level bookmaker with connections to the Gambino crime family. Tommy served as his driver, running him from Philly to New York to pick up or drop off large sums of cash. I knew Tommy was involved with Ba Ba, but I didn’t know the whole story. To be honest, I really didn’t want to know. It turns out that Battista, who had long since quit working out and had ballooned to over 300 pounds, was not an actual member of the Gambino crime family, but Tommy did talk about how he was “connected.” If Tommy and I were talking on the phone and he mentioned that Ba Ba was in the house, I’d tell him, “Okay, I’ll talk to you later.” To his credit, Tommy had told Ba Ba after that initial approach in 1994 that I was really pissed and that I wanted nothing to do with him. Supposedly, Ba Ba let it go…at least until that night at the Marriott.

Over the years, I had become quite the sports gambler myself. Maybe it was all that downtime on the road as an NBA referee. Maybe I just needed something to fill my days. Whatever it was, I began betting on golf, baseball, football, and eventually pro basketball.

Lots of people make bets, but for an NBA referee, gambling is seen as the kiss of death. The NBA was so concerned about the integrity of the game that it contractually required referees to abstain from all forms of gambling, with the sole exception of horse racing during the off-season summer months. No casinos, no cards, no office pools, not even a wager over a friendly game of golf. Nothing! For a good Catholic boy from Philly, an innocent wager might qualify as a venial sin, at worst. But in the NBA, gambling was a mortal sin punishable by eternal damnation. I knew the rules going in, but for reasons that to this day are difficult to articulate, I did it: I gambled. And worst of all, I bet on pro basketball.

For bets that required a bookie, I relied on the connections of Jack Concannon, yet another high school friend of mine. Jack and I had mixed results on most wagers, but when it came to pro basketball, our winning percentage was off the charts. The reason for our success was simple: because of my years of experience in the NBA, I was intimately familiar with the other NBA referees, their strengths and weaknesses, and their unique relationships with various players, coaches, and team owners. That’s all it took. If I knew which referees were working a particular game, I could generally pick the winner or at least cover the spread. Predicting the outcome of a game using my subjective formula proved to be unbelievably easy. Let me explain.

Allen Iverson provides a good example of a player who generated strong reaction, both positive and negative, within the corps of NBA referees. For instance, veteran referee Steve Javie hated Allen Iverson and was loathe to give him a favorable call. If Javie was on the court when Iverson was playing, I would always bet on the other team to win or at least cover the spread. No matter how many times Iverson hit the floor, he rarely saw the foul line. By contrast, referee Joe Crawford had a grandson who idolized Iverson. I once saw Crawford bring the boy out of the stands and onto the floor during warm-ups to meet the superstar. Iverson and Crawford’s grandson were standing there, shaking hands, smiling, talking about all kinds of things. If Joe Crawford was on the court, I was pretty sure Iverson’s team would win or at least cover the spread.

That’s how it went with referee after referee, player after player, team after team. Some referees hated Mark Cuban, the outspoken owner of the Dallas Mavericks. Others despised Robert Sarver, owner of the Phoenix Suns. Depending on which officiating crew worked their games, those teams could be in for a long night.

My system took various factors into account, including injuries to players, game venues, and specific directives from the league office, just to name a few. However, my picks were based mostly on my knowledge of which referees were working a game. Each game day, the NBA prepared a master list of referee assignments. The list was private and was not made available to anyone in advance other than the referees and a few high-ranking league officials. That list was virtually all I needed.

Of course, not everyone knew the details of the referees’ relationships with players, coaches, and teams. But I did. I knew the referees who had personal vendetta against a player or a coach. I also had an inside advantage because of my access to pregame meetings. It was common for my fellow referees to voice their opinions about who they expected to win on a given night. Those opinions were often based on their knowledge of confidential inside information pertaining to players and teams, such as injury reports unknown to the general public.

I would take all the information I could find and create my own betting line for games. Initially, I did it for games I didn’t referee, and then, to my greater shame, games that I did referee. I compared the line I created with the betting line in USA Today. If there was a disparity of more than three points, Jack and I would bet the game. It sounds astonishing to some, but we won 70 to 80 percent of our bets. Great results for sure, but astonishing? Not to me.

If Jack and I had bet exclusively on NBA games, we would have made a fortune. But we weren’t satisfied with stopping there; we bet on virtually every sport we could. We would bet on 15 NFL games, a dozen college football games, or anything and everything else that had a line. On other sports, we were up some and down some—generally more down than up, like most sports bettors. But when it came to the NBA, our bets were golden. Every now and then we would come to our senses and say, “This is stupid. Let’s not do this anymore. We’re crossing the line here.” And then we would stop betting on NBA games for a while. Eventually, one of us would go to a casino and lose $10,000 or $15,000, and all of a sudden we were back in business.

I didn’t realize that Jack was telling other people about our unholy alliance, but he was. Jack placed our bets with a bookie named Pete Ruggieri, who was excited to say the least when Jack told him about me. I can just imagine the look on Ruggieri’s face when Jack told him he was getting his picks from an NBA referee. Talk about winning the lottery—Ruggieri probably had a new Rolex on his wrist and a shiny Caddy in the driveway before Jack got the words out of his mouth. I can’t believe how naïve I was when I occasionally reminded Jack not to tell anyone what we were doing. I never thought it would go any further than the two of us.

But as usually happens in situations like this, Ruggieri was so giddy over his newfound good fortune that he had to share it with someone else. He gave the information to—you guessed it—James “Ba Ba” Battista, and although I was not aware of it at the time, Ba Ba and his crew immediately began to secretly bet along with us, initially placing $25,000 a game on my picks. Why did Ruggieri have to tell Ba Ba, of all people? Why couldn’t he tell a stripper during a lap dance or share a little pillow talk with his mistress? No, it had to be Ba Ba!

Finally, in early November of 2006, I just said, “Jack, I don’t feel comfortable doing this anymore. Let’s quit. We’re never going to do this again.” Jack understood, but then word traveled down the line that I was no longer making picks. Jack told Ruggieri, who in turn told Ba Ba.

That’s when Tommy Martino started calling repeatedly to tell me that Ba Ba wanted to talk about something important. At that point, I didn’t know Ba Ba was connected to the Gambinos, and I didn’t know that he had been using my picks to make bets of his own. I didn’t know exactly why he wanted to talk to me, but I figured he was going to get me in trouble. Later, I learned from the FBI that Ba Ba had been making millions on my picks. So that’s why, on the night of December 12, 2006, Tommy and Ba Ba turned up in a four-door Honda at the Marriott Hotel in Philadelphia.


As soon as I saw Battista, I thought to myself, Oh shit, nothing good is going to come of this. I debated turning around and going back into the hotel, but I decided I might as well get it over with and hear what they had to say. I was shocked by how much Ba Ba had changed since high school. He was a blob of a man, nothing like his days of bulging muscles and tight-fitted shirts. Then the terrible thought ran through my mind: I wonder if he knows what I’ve been doing. That’s when it hit me. He wasn’t there to catch up on old times. He was there for one reason only: to put the squeeze on me, to shake me down.

Tommy started driving, telling me that he needed something at the convenience store. As he drove, Ba Ba turned to me and said quietly, “We know what’s been going on.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“We know you’ve been giving information to Jack,” Ba Ba said. “Jack’s been booking his bets with Pete, and Pete’s been telling us.”

Suddenly, I was sick to my stomach. I didn’t know where this was going, but I knew I was in a major jam. It was a cold winter night in Philadelphia, but I felt like sweat was pouring down my forehead.

“You’re better off going through me,” Ba Ba said. “You don’t want the NBA to find out about this.”

The NBA? In my mind, Jack and I had already stopped betting on NBA games; it was over, a thing of the past. Now, suddenly, Ba Ba was trying to drag me back into it, but on a much bigger scale. There’s got to be some way out of this, I thought, but as I sat in the back of that car, I was numb. We reached the convenience store, Tommy and I went in, and I immediately laid into him.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I asked angrily. “Bringing him down to me?”

“Tim, he’s like a wart up my ass,” Tommy responded. “I can’t get rid of him.” I just shook my head.

Tommy bought a ChapStick or something like that and we got back in the car and returned to the Marriott. We went straight to the restaurant, but I was so nauseated that I couldn’t eat. Ba Ba, however, ordered 10 appetizers and the table was quickly covered with platters of food.

They told me how we were going to set the whole thing up. “For every correct pick you give me, I’ll give you $2,000,” Ba Ba explained. “By the way, it’s going to be 2,000 ‘apples.’ From now on, we talk about money, it’s ‘apples.’ It’ll be 2,000 ‘apples’ for you, and 2,000 for Martino over there.”

“Ba Ba,” I explained desperately, “I can’t do this. This is going to get me in a lot of trouble.”

Ba Ba looked me right in the eye. “You don’t want anyone from New York visiting your wife and kids in Florida, do you?” he asked, his threat hanging in the air.

Right then and there, I knew it was take it or leave it. He was willing to drag my wife and kids into it. I wasn’t sure if the threat was real or not, but he seemed very serious that night and I wasn’t going to take any chances.

After dinner, the waitress brought the bill to the table. It was like a scene straight out of The Sopranos: Ba Ba pulled a folded wad of greenbacks wrapped with a rubber band out of his duffel bag and peeled off enough cash to pay the $150 bill and leave a $100 tip.

“You’re coming to Martino’s house tomorrow,” Ba Ba demanded, “and you’re going to tell us how to bet the game tomorrow night, Philly against Boston.”

I was scheduled to referee that game—that’s why I was in town. And now this. The entire time they were eating, I was looking around the restaurant, afraid that somebody might recognize me and the two thugs at my table.

After dinner, I headed to my hotel room knowing that I had been hooked by Ba Ba. At that very moment, I understood with perfect clarity that there was no way this thing could end well.

Pathetically, I still clung to the notion that I might somehow be able to hold onto my job. I figured that since the NBA didn’t know about the gambling I did with Jack, I might be in the clear on all of that. I even tried to convince myself that the whole thing with Ba Ba would only run until the NBA Finals, and then he would cut me loose. Clearly I was grasping at straws, trying to keep myself from facing the horrible reality of what was occurring. The lives of my wife and children had been threatened. Harm would come to them, to me, or to all of us if I didn’t give picks—winning picks—to this low-rent hoodlum.

I always stayed close to my wife and daughters during the season, and when I was on the road, I would typically call them on the phone five or six times a day. That night, my wife Kim called around 10:00 PM and she could tell I was not myself. Obviously, I couldn’t tell her what had just happened. She was peppering me with all kinds of questions: “Is everything okay? Did you see your mom and dad? What’s going on?” I just told her I was tired and we said good night.

In bed, I tossed and turned, thinking, There’s got to be a way out of this. I couldn’t go to law enforcement. Can you imagine what that conversation would have sounded like?

Donaghy: Ba Ba threatened me and said that if I didn’t give him my NBA picks, he would do something to my wife and kids.

FBI: Why did he come to you?

Donaghy: Because he knew I had been gambling on NBA games for years.

FBI: Oh really?

The next morning, I visited my parents as I always did on trips to Philadelphia. I also saw a buddy of mine who was struggling with cancer. I never said a word to anyone. Instead, I dutifully showed up at Tommy’s house at 2:30 that afternoon. Tommy was divorced with no kids and lived in a middle-class neighborhood in the Philadelphia suburb of Chichester.

When I entered the house, Tommy’s handgun was on the kitchen counter; he explained that the gun was for “protection.” What am I doing here? I thought to myself, feeling trapped. Why did I ever bet on NBA games?

In the end, I did exactly what they wanted me to do. I told them that Allen Iverson was gone from the 76ers and that because it was still early in the season, the underachieving Celtics would be competitive. I told them that Boston would start tanking games in late January or early February, but for the time being they were still playing hard. On top of that, at the pregame meeting that morning one of my fellow referees, Derrick Stafford, told us he thought Philadelphia coach Maurice Cheeks didn’t have a clue about coaching and that forward Chris Webber was washed up and couldn’t jump anymore. So at least Stafford seemed convinced that Boston was going to win. When the refs make up their minds in the pregame meeting, it often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. That’s the type of information I used in many of my picks. That was it: I told Tommy and Ba Ba to go with Boston, and then I got the hell out of there.

That night on the court, as the national anthem played and the Boston Celtics and the Philadelphia 76ers stood at attention, I just stared straight ahead, knowing I had given Ba Ba inside information. In a lame attempt to deny complicity in the dirty scheme, I made a personal promise that I would not make any calls to influence the outcome. I tried to put the whole thing out of my mind and do my job as though it was just another game. And then, just before the anthem was finished, I looked about 10 rows up in the crowd and thought I saw Ba Ba. Oh my God, I thought. He’s here to remind me of our deal. It turned out to be just a guy who looked like Ba Ba, but the sight of that fat slob sent a chill through my entire body.

The game was a blowout: Boston won 101-81. Somehow, I was able to get lost in the game and concentrate on my job as a referee. I actually managed to put the business with Ba Ba out of my mind for a couple of hours, but then I truly disgusted myself by thinking, Wow, I’m getting $2,000 tomorrow!

I knew I was screwed and in a tight spot, but I also knew I was going to Tommy’s house the following day and getting $2,000 in cash. My gambling instincts were taking over, and I was perversely excited.

My family, my career, and my personal freedom all hung in the balance, but I was actually juiced about winning the bet. On top of that, I still thought that somehow the whole thing might blow over and I would be able to keep my job as an NBA referee. Talk about delusional! I am a compulsive gambler and I actually thought that this mess could be resolved in my favor. It’s like chasing one bad bet with another. It’s all an illusion; it’s smoke and mirrors. The only thing that’s real is the incongruity of feeling total desperation while simultaneously experiencing exhilaration and euphoria. They call that feeling the “gambler’s high,” and for reasons that defy logic, I had it—and I loved it.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. Ba Ba and I met the next day and he tossed me $2,000 rolled up in a rubber band. I wondered how I would hide the money; I couldn’t put it in the bank and I certainly couldn’t tell my wife. I began to convince myself that I was making the best of a bad situation.

Ba Ba immediately wanted my next pick for a game that night. I had already done my homework, studying the master list of referees and scoping out the matchups slated for that evening. I liked San Antonio against New Orleans, primarily because of the referees. In the NBA, three refs work a game, and that night Joe Forte, Sean Corbin, and Eli Roe would be on the court. Forte always like San Antonio coach Greg Popovich and the way he ran the Spur’s organization. One vote for San Antonio. Pop was tough on refs, and I knew he could control Corbin and Roe if they weren’t giving him the calls he wanted. Corbin, in my opinion, was a weak referee, and Roe was young and not likely to stand up to the intimidating ways of a veteran coach like Popovich. So it was an easy call: San Antonio.

That night, San Antonio blew out New Orleans 103-77 and I earned another $2,000.

Through it all, I failed to realize that I had suddenly become the central figure in a Mafia-controlled gambling ring and that my picks would generate millions of dollars for the Gambino crime family. I never dreamed that within eight short months, I would be the focus of an NBA betting scandal, a target of the FBI and federal prosecutors, and a national disgrace. All I was thinking about was my $2,000 cut, what I would do with the money, and my naïve and misplaced notion that Ba Ba would eventually release me from his grasp and allow me to retreat into the shadows.

From respected NBA referee to mafioso. What the hell happened to me?

Personal Foul

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