Speaker 1What do electricity bills, AI data centers, and climate change have to do with the U.S. midterm elections? Well, quite a bit, actually. Hey, it's Johanna Wagstaff, host of What on Earth, where we help make sense of how people are changing the planet and what we can do about it. This week, Democrats have pulled off some surprising election victories. And while climate change wasn't necessarily on the ballot, the cost of energy certainly was. So what could these results mean for climate action in America, especially with Donald Trump still president? Find and follow What on Earth wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2This is a CBC podcast. A quick warning before we get started. This episode contains adult language and descriptions of violence. Here's Porter launching a deep three at the end of the clock. Conchar saves. It's 2021, Jonte Porter's first year with the Memphis Grizzlies. And from the start, life in the NBA is a struggle.
Speaker 3As far as the basketball career is concerned, I think things are not going the way he wanted them to.
Speaker 2This is Anthony Milton, the Toronto journalist who profiled Jonte through this time.
Speaker 3His knees were still giving him problems. And in the 2021-22 season with the Grizzlies, he barely played, just showed up on the court 11 times. And they dropped him early.
Speaker 2At first, Jonte clung to a spot in the NBA. The Detroit Pistons have signed Jonte Porter to an exhibit
Speaker 310 deal. He signed with the Detroit Pistons in October 2023, but was waived again just a month later.
Speaker 2Demoted before the regular season even started.
Speaker 3Quite literally, the second he gets on his feet, his knees collapse from under him. And he just can't perform.
Speaker 2He was sent down to Detroit's developmental squad, the Motor City Crews, in the NBA's minor league, aka the G League. For NBA G League basketball. It's got to be intensely frustrating. Porter in the paint gets cut off and lucky to get some. Jonte bounced around, trying to get back into the NBA, when an opportunity emerged in Toronto.
Speaker 3In 2023, he signed a two-way contract to play with the Raptors and their G League team, the Raptors 905. So this was a chance for him to get his life back on track. And when the Raptors lost Ron Harper Jr. to injury and needed to replace him, a spot open for Jonte. And in he came.
Speaker 4So, you've been getting some run in the past couple of games now. Just give me your overall takeaway so far. My takeaway is that the NBA is a lot more like chess compared to the G League, which is a little bit more like checkers. Especially in my position, because, you know, limited run, I got to make a name for myself. I got to stick out in some capacity.
Speaker 2And that's why Jonte appeared on the Toronto Raptors YouTube channel as the newest name on the team's roster.
Speaker 4Hone in on, you know, the chess aspect of it, the better it is for me. And hopefully we can keep these wins rolling.
Speaker 2But off the court, there's another pressure on Jonte.
Speaker 3His income, the revenue side of the whole thing, took a big plunge.
Speaker 2When Jonte Porter signed with the Grizzlies back in 2020, it was for nearly $6 million over three years. But that contract wasn't fully guaranteed, meaning that when Jonte Porter signed with the Grizzlies, when they dropped him early, he lost out on millions.
Speaker 3So he no longer had the cash that he was counting on. Now, I don't know the total balance in his personal accounts. What we do know was that in 2024, he was betting again, and this time under the table. And that put him at risk. If Jonte Porter is an athlete that is known, at least in some circles, to have a gambling problem, then he's a good mark.
Speaker 2When sports betting was legalized, athletes suddenly became more than players. They became betting chips. Their points, their rebounds, their injuries. Now, win or lose people money. Sometimes a lot of money. And if everybody's gambling on athletes, what happens to an athlete who wants or maybe needs to gamble on themselves? I'm Danny Funt, and this is Understood the Big Bet. Episode 3, Players or Props? Jonte Porter's slide from placing bets to fixing games seemed to start when he met a group of gamblers in the U.S. mostly based in and around New York.
Speaker 3Somehow, Jonte Porter becomes acquainted with a crew of guys who are very well enmeshed with not just the legal gambling scene, but also the under-the-table poker-playing gambling scene.
Speaker 2Long-fee fam, Mahmud Mola, Timothy McCormick. And at the head of the operation, Amar Awade, who sometimes went by Flappy. Through his attorney, he's been able to get a hold of him for a long time. He's been able to get a hold of him for a long time. Through his attorney, Amar Awade declined to speak to me for this story. But details about his life have since come out. He'd been in New York's underground poker scene since he was a teenager. At 16, he split his time between working at his family's grocery store and dealing games in Brooklyn. He was a hustler, sometimes of the most loathsome variety. Once, he was convicted of scamming a disabled homeless woman out of nearly $800,000. She'd been awarded the money after she got hit by a subway car. Awade tricked her into giving it to him and spent it on lavish vacations. At the poker table, Awade developed a reputation for being loud, fearless, and a master bluffer. He also seemed remarkably cavalier about money. The kind of gambler who wasn't worried how much he lost, nor was he phased when he made a big win. That's likely because, as federal indictments would later reveal, Awade's poker games were fixed. He and a group of co-conspirators would lure wealthy marks to rigged games. Awade was like the inspector gadget of card rooms, using elaborate technology like corrupted shuffling machines, hidden cameras that could read cards face down as they were dealt, even card decks marked by UV ink that would show their story. The ink is invisible to the naked eye, but visible to someone wearing specially tinted contact lenses. By the time Jonte Porter entered the picture, Awade was running some of New York City's biggest poker games on behalf of the Gambino crime family. And Porter, it seems, caught Awade's attention.
Speaker 3If they were monitoring his social media, they would have found all this data. All this day trading stuff, all this cryptocurrency stuff, the social media handle where he bragged about what are essentially bets on the market. All of those things would have indicated to them that they had the right kind of personality. They had a guy that was used to this, and it would not have been so hard to say, OK, you've done that, how about you try this? And try he did. We know that he starts racking up a serious gambling debt to Amaru Awade.
Speaker 2These were not the type of men you want to owe money. By early 2024, Porter seemed to recognize he was in trouble, possibly in danger. Porter sent a message to Awade on Telegram. It read, quote, If I don't get you 8K by Friday, you're coming to Toronto to beat me up, end quote. That wouldn't be necessary. Instead, the gamblers had another plan for how Porter could clear his debts. One that would require him to risk everything he'd want to risk. One he'd worked for since he was a little kid. Getting up at dawn to practice basketball with his dad and brother. A plan that could end his NBA career. Possibly even send him to prison.
Speaker 3I'm not sure what Jonte Porter was thinking about his future at that point. You know, this is a guy who had been through a lot. And yeah, you know, there was a trajectory for him that may have made him think, Oh man, I don't know about this NBA thing. I can't recover from my injuries. I'm only getting older. Although I think there's also evidence to suggest that at the time he might have been thinking the opposite.
Speaker 2Evidence like that Raptors interview from this era where Jonte seemed so hopeful.
Speaker 4And over time, my role will probably expand and evolve. But for now, I'm really comfortable just going in there, doing what I can to impact the game.
Speaker 3He might have been going, I've done it this far. I can do this. I'm in the Raptors now. Things are on the up and up. I'm not sure what he was thinking.
Speaker 2But here's what we do know. Jonte was in the NBA. He was gambling. And he owed a lot of money to a scary dude. And all of that was happening at a moment when the relationship between athletes and gambling had changed dramatically. Because at the same time that Jonte Porter was getting deeper into gambling, gambling was getting closer and closer to athletes.
Speaker 3So prop betting is the revolution here. With single event sports betting, What people are now able to do is bet not just on the outcome of the game, but on statistical minutia for any particular player on the field.
Speaker 2And some bettors are letting players know when their bets don't hit.
Speaker 5As far as death threats, it's just not something you want to be reading straight after an emotional loss, or even a lot of the time you get it after you win as well. It depends which way the person has bet. The next thing you know, your DM is crazy. Like, death threats and stuff like that, like, nobody want to live like that. I mean, I just got a text right now. Some dude told me, I hope you blow your knee out. You know, yeah, like, it gets out of pocket for sure.
Speaker 2One gambler was arrested for sending this message to a pro football player on the New England Patriots over Instagram. In all caps, they wrote, I'll rape and murder your entire family. And I will enter your home while you sleep. And sever your neck open with a dull knife. Another wrote to a star Purdue basketball player, Yo, no big deal, but if you don't get 22 points and 12 boards, everyone you know and love will be dead. Chris Boucher, then a Toronto Raptor, described how a gambler, upset that Boucher's scoring total had ruined his bet, told the black player on social media, I chose the wrong player. I chose the wrong slave today. It's brutal, it's relentless, and it's not just coming at athletes through their DMs.
Speaker 6Russell, Russell, I fuck with you. I just want you to play better. I bet on you every night. Come on, man. I bet on you. You're good. Bro, I put 3,000. I went 30. Why you didn't have 30 perks? Jimmy, button up. Why you did not have a 30 perks? You were supposed to go over, bitch. You work for Vegas. You work for Vegas.
Speaker 7Look, there's going to be crazy fans in sport. We know that. But when those fans are wagering, when they're putting money on the line, and you are the one that they perceive to have cost them those winnings,
Speaker 2that's a different emotion. Dr. Jim Borchers is the chief medical officer of the Big Ten, one of the most elite college sports conferences in the United States. He's responsible for thinking about the health of more than 14,000 student-athletes. And one of the greatest mental health issues he's seeing on the rise is connected to harassment from gamblers.
Speaker 7If you think about their expectation to compete at the highest level in college athletics, and now you put that stress on them, it's going to have consequences. It's going to affect their overall emotional health, their mood. It can cause depression, anxiety. It can affect sleep. That affects recovery and ability to perform. And look, I think it affects motivation. I think it affects their drive to do. And why they're doing it. And eventually, just like all of us, if something becomes overwhelming enough, you just kind of shut down because you have to. And that is happening with athletes.
Speaker 5At the end of the day, we are human beings. We have feelings, you know? Just like you, you wake up, go to work, and someone is wishing nothing but the worst to you and your work. You know, it's mental draining, and nobody wants to deal with that for a whole five-month season.
Speaker 2That's Omar Balo speaking during a post-game conference in 2025. At the time, he was a 22-year-old college basketball player, regularly getting death threats from frustrated bettors. Over the course of the 2024 March Madness tournaments, those are the championship competitions for men's and women's college basketball in the United States, NCAA research found roughly one in three high-profile players received abusive messages from someone with a betting interest. Around this time, someone at the NCAA told me that this kind of gambling-fueled harassment, once akin to a flickering flame, was now like a wildfire burning out of control. It got so bad, the organization ran a commercial pleading with the public to stop. Only a loser would harass college athletes after losing a bet. But it happens almost every day. Root for your team. Now, heckling athletes isn't anything new. North Carolina State Representative Jason Sane put the argument bluntly. Athletes who are in the public sphere, they're going to get criticized, period. That happened before sports betting. It will happen after sports betting.
Speaker 7Dr. Jim Borchers doesn't see it that way. I disagree that it's just the same because the way that people get attacked is different. Now, individuals who may think that they're performing really well in their sport, are now being criticized because they didn't meet some artificial performance or line that's been established for them in that game.
Speaker 2But there's a whole other element to this. College athletes, many of them young men obsessed with sports, are also the exact target demographic of sports bettors. In 2024, the NCAA estimated that at least 6,000 athletes would be in the public sphere. 6,000 U.S. college athletes are suffering from a gambling disorder themselves. So I asked Dr. Borchers about this. How concerned are you about the rise of gambling addiction among college athletes?
Speaker 7Well, I'm concerned about the rise of gambling addiction among all males ages 18 to 24 because of access. And to think that athletes are not going to do what their peers are doing is, you know, it's just naive.
Speaker 2Which raises the question, what about when they turn pro?
Speaker 8The conversations with the league about gambling always centered on player discipline. Always. And we had pretty harsh penalties, I think still do have harsh penalties, in the National Football League with respect to gambling.
Speaker 2DeMorris-Smith spent 15 years as the executive director of the NFL Players Association, the union representing the interests of professional, American football players.
Speaker 8I'm a hardcore union guy. Yeah, a hardcore union guy. And a bit of an asshole.
Speaker 2So, yeah. Remember, for most of the history of professional sports, the leagues had a simple message for athletes when it came to gambling. Don't. And DeMorris says for the players, that was fine.
Speaker 8Every player in the National Football League, for the most part, did not have a problem with very, very strict rules about gambling. Before legalization,
Speaker 2DeMorris says that the wall between the game and betting on the game felt rock solid.
Speaker 8And when that changed, it was literally overnight. The owners in particular, they saw the revenue opportunities from gambling as something that they just simply couldn't pass up. And like any good capitalist, they will sell literally anything to make a dollar.
Speaker 2So, DeMorris started asking a pretty obvious question on behalf of the players.
Speaker 8Frankly, if the owners and the teams themselves were getting involved in this business, why shouldn't we? He set out to help
Speaker 2the players get a cut of the windfall through the Players Association's commercial arm,
Speaker 8Players Inc. And, you know, the league was, as we would charitably say, not thrilled about the Players Association's company having that relationship.
Speaker 2Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the NFL, didn't seem pleased with the optics of it. It's one thing for league executives to be rubbing shoulders with gambling companies, and quite another for the players themselves to get caught up in that business. But DeMorris being DeMorris, he pushed back.
Speaker 8That ended up resolving itself by, I think I made the decision that we were going to go, we were going to do a deal anyway, and let's see what happens. Which, you know, always happens. It always causes a lovely conversation between myself and Roger Goodell. And when I say lovely, I mean not lovely.
Speaker 2Today, professional athletes are undoubtedly richer thanks to the legal betting business, whether because of specific deals between their unions and gambling companies, or simply because more gambling means more eyeballs, which translates to more lucrative TV deals.
Speaker 8But there are limits. The rules about players, their involvement in gambling, that rule continues until today, which is ironic, obviously, given the proverbial bed the gambling companies and the owners in particular have climbed into.
Speaker 2DeMorris isn't a puritan about sports gambling per se. Maybe some of the headaches that come with legalization are a worthwhile price to pay if it allows the NFL to make billions from gambling, every year. But he does worry that, in one respect, professional sports are now playing with fire.
Speaker 8We've always lived in a world where we relied on this idea, and I think it's, for the most part, well-placed, that athletes are unwilling to throw the game. But what if an athlete didn't have to throw the game to swing the outcome of a bet? Where we are now with proposition betting is a lot of people are allowed to bet. out to not bet on the outcome of the game, but to bet on the outcome of a stat? And does it become easier to think of it as, I'm not throwing the game, I'm throwing a stat? Here's Anthony Milton again.
Speaker 3For a match fixer, you can do really minute things and people can bet on those and have their bets pay off. So for instance, if one was to get slightly less rebounds than usual, that would be enough to make someone else a lot of money.
Speaker 2And that was exactly what Jonte Porter was about to do.
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Speaker 2Very few familiar faces for Kawhi Leonard and Norman Powell to catch up with as their Clippers visit Toronto for the first time since December 2022. It's January 26, 2024 at the Scotiabank Arena in Toronto. The Raptors are playing the L.A. Clippers. The biggest name on the court by far is Kawhi Leonard, beloved in the city for leading Toronto to its NBA championship in 2019. It's 21-13 as we head to the four-minute mark of the opening quarter. Jonte Porter checking in. By comparison, Jonte Porter is barely a footnote. He's a bench player on a two-way deal fighting for his job in the NBA. And a foul is going to be called. It's on Jonte Porter. On the court, nothing looks unusual.
Speaker 3He's playing okay. He's getting rebounds. He's passing. He's blocking.
Speaker 2He gets one foul, sure, but Jonte isn't wildly chucking the ball out of bounds or making bizarre plays. Over the course of four minutes, he scores zero points, but he gets three rebounds and an
Speaker 3assist. But unbeknownst to everyone, he's a good player. He's a good player. He's a good player. He's a good Everyone else on the court there. Jonte is intentionally underperforming. He had texted Longfei Pham, another one of the conspirators in the U.S., hit unders for the big numbers, no blocks, no steals. I'm going to play the first two or three minutes stint off the bench, and then when I get subbed out, tell them my eye killing me again.
Speaker 2The game before, Jonte had been hit by another player in the eye, and he got diagnosed by the team doctor with a corneal abrasion, a.k.a.?
Speaker 3A scratch on the eye. And so he had an excuse, and he used that excuse. Jonte Porter went back to the locker room. Turns out he still has a scratch on his left eye that is irritating him right now, and he will not be available to return. So at the end of the first quarter, you can see him walking off the court, and he gestures to his left eye with the official, and he gets benched. So he left the court. That means he can't perform. Suddenly, everything is under his average. And Awade and his crew of guys all won money off of that because they placed prop bets that he would underperform, and he did.
Speaker 2One of them put $7,000 on a parlay, betting that Jonte would come in under for three-pointers, points, assists, and rebounds. The payout, if all of that panned out, $40,250. Another wager, placed by one of Awade's relatives, put $10,000 on three Jonte unders. That would pay out at $85,000. So, huge hits. Huge hits. This is, it seems, maybe the first game that Jonte had rigged to make sure that those props hit. Four. Four. What would have happened if he'd been caught at that point?
Speaker 3It would have been very bad. It would have been very, very bad. I mean, at very least, he would have been suspended. There could have been a RICO charge against him and his gamblers for essentially defrauding the NBA.
Speaker 2RICO stands for the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, a 1970s law originally passed to target organized crime in the U.S. And it would have been left
Speaker 3up to the NBA to determine what to do with him.
Speaker 2But Jonte Porter wasn't caught at that point.
Speaker 4I guess just overall level of being prepared is super-duper important. And for me, I'm trying to take that with my sleep, with my diet.
Speaker 2Through his agent, Jonte Porter declined repeated interview requests for this series. So I've never had the chance to ask him how an athlete, one getting a real shot to prove himself in Toronto after years of overcoming adversity, came to take a risk like this. From his years of representing NFL players, DeMora Smith says he's watched athletes resist all kinds of temptations.
Speaker 8You know, players, they don't step out of bounds unless it's a mistake. For the most part, players no longer use the crown of their head to make a tackle. For the most part, athletes do not take steroids, right? So I am absolutely firmly aware of how most athletes respond to the issue of integrity and rule following, right? So when it comes to an athlete who bets on the game or bets on their game or does some sort of prop bet, I really don't have much sympathy given the extent to which you follow every other rule, right? I mean, I think it's a more insidious problem.
Speaker 2When it comes to player harassment since the legalization of sports betting, Dr. Jim Borchers says the system is asking athletes to absorb consequences they never signed up for.
Speaker 7Trying to put the responsibility of how they deal with that back on the athlete, back on the individual, and really all they're trying to do is compete at their sport and hopefully have very little interest in what's happening in the gambling world.
Speaker 2The harassment story and the fixing story can look like two separate consequences of sports betting. One is about gamblers attacking athletes. The other is about gamblers conspiring with athletes. But where they converge? Is prop betting.
Speaker 7Proposition wagers are going specifically to individuals and specifically to very specific things those individuals are doing at a very specific time and in real time.
Speaker 2Today, prop bets on individual professional athletes are allowed in every province, territory, and U.S. state where sports betting is legal. U-Sports, the national governing body for university sports and gambling, is the only place where sports betting is legal. Canada has never allowed bets on student-athletes. And in 2025, in the U.S., the NCAA made a call. It also wanted prop bets on individual student-athletes banned. As of fall 2026, 14 states now prohibit prop bets on individual college players. NCAA president Charlie Baker has consistently stated that this push is driven predominantly by concerns, over student mental health, with the integrity of the game as a secondary concern. But I wanted to ask Damoris Smith about that little word. Getting back to that word, integrity, the NFL, just like the NBA, NHL, and Major League Baseball, insists that legalizing sports betting actually makes it easier to identify potential evidence of fixing and to catch players who are betting when they shouldn't be, thus reducing the threat of gambling. Do you buy that?
Speaker 8No. No. First of all, they're still gambling under the table. Second, there is always going to be people who think that they can violate the rules. And the worst thing that you can assume in a compliance system is that if it is above board, and if everyone knows the rules, we can therefore relax. That is true. That is literally the worst thing that you can do. The moment you think that you have a good system is the day that you have a bad system.
Speaker 2And Jonte Porter was going to test that system. After walking off the court during the L.A. Clippers game, Jonte seemingly went back to giving it his all for the next dozen or so games. But less than two months later, He and the crew are going to try it again, place another series fixed bets, only this time for much, much more money. Next time on the fourth and final episode of Understood the Big Bet.
Speaker 3They were so brazen in putting down, I think it was like $80,000 bet on Jonte Porter. This isn't LeBron. Pham tries to leave the country, texts his friend about trying to leave the country and gets arrested at JFK Airport. Trailblazers coach Chauncey Billups and Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier have both been arrested as part of FBI investigations into
Speaker 2sports gambling. It tells me that this is a larger scope story than even the federal investigation led you to believe. You've been listening to Understood the Big Bet. Our lead producer is A.C. Rowe. The producers are Arman Agbali and Hadil Abdel-Nabi. The sound designer is Julian Uzielli. Our story editor and senior producer is Veronica Simmons. I'm Danny Funt. In this episode, you heard archival tape from the Memphis Grizzlies, Pistons Talk, the Iowa Wolves, the Toronto Raptors, BBC Sport, WISH-TV, WRAL, Six Buzz TV, and the NCAA. The executive producers of CBC Podcasts are Chris Oak and Cecil Fernandez. The senior manager is Tanya Springer and the director of CBC Podcasts is Arif Noorani. For more from Understood, check out our season The Making of Musk. It tells the story of how Elon Musk's upbringing in apartheid South Africa shaped the politics he later brought to the White House and big tech. You can find Understood The Making of Musk wherever you're listening to me now. Just scroll back in your understanding. Understood Feed.
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