To make the big money, you’ve got to underperform.

It was 1981 when I heard that paradoxical pearl of wisdom as a young deputy U.S. marshal in the Witness Protection Program. It came from our celebrated protectee, Henry Hill, the New York mobster immortalized a decade later by Ray Liotta’s star turn in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas — cinema’s truest portrait of the Mafia’s insouciant savagery. Hill was in New York to sing for prosecutors about the Boston College basketball point-shaving scandal.

Flash forward more than four decades — through the mob’s decline, a telecommunications revolution, and a 2018 Supreme Court ruling that turbocharged legalized gambling. We’ve reached the inevitable: betting scandals that are rocking the sports world. It makes Hill’s Seventies show seem quaint. The $100,000 he cleared wouldn’t amount to a rounding error in today’s dystopia.

Gambling was never an honest pursuit. Yet, when it was illegal, its stigma and adjacence to other vices — loan-sharking, substance abuse, prostitution — limited participation in it to a hard core. Pools drawn from the demimonde were but a fraction of today’s gargantuan wagering streams. The lack of communications-era tech also kept things in check: there were many ways to bet on a game — point spreads; over/under (betting on whether the cumulative number of points, runs, or goals scored would be more or less than a predicted number); parlays of multiple games, etc. — but essentially you had to bet on the outcome. It wasn’t possible, with a few taps of your phone and a credit-card-backed account, to bet live on whether a shot would swish through the net, a pitch would cross the plate, or an attempted field goal would sail wide of the uprights. The focus, for the most part, was on the teams, not the players. There weren’t fantasy leagues; now, to a fandom of amateur general managers, fantasy is more attractive than the real thing.

Yes, we Cro-Magnons still declaim that “there’s no ‘I’ in ‘team.’” But for fantasy-league devotees, and for gamblers who make online proposition (prop) bets while the games are in progress, what matters is the “I” — the individual’s statistics: a selected player’s attempts (catch or drop, single or strikeout) or in-game metrics (total points, minutes played, total bases or rebounds). Which team won or lost? An afterthought, . . . although of course you can still bet on that, too.

Legalized gambling is a different world from the one controlled by organized crime. Nearly $150 billion was wagered through industry operators last year, up nearly 25 percent compared with 2023. These are the so-called sportsbooks, now embraced in devil’s pacts with the leagues and teams whose greed renders them indifferent to what history shows is an existential threat. The mob’s bookies never had it as good as the online books — FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM, Caesars Sportsbook, etc. — which took in almost $14 billion in 2024.

Still, while the gross revenue has dramatically increased, rudimentary elements of rigging schemes never will. The cheater wants a sure thing. The rare Secretariat at Belmont notwithstanding, a strategy that relies on superior performance is not a sure thing. Success is uncertain and requires great effort. In stark contrast, underperformance is a cinch.

Boston College had a decent basketball team in 1978, but the bookies naturally made it a 15-point underdog against UCLA, a perennial powerhouse. If BC covertly but purposely missed a shot here or turned the ball over there, who’d be suspicious when it lost by 22? And so superior was BC to Harvard’s squad that it was the sizable favorite, by a 13-point spread. Insiders rejoiced when it won by three; losers were none the wiser.

What made Hill’s rigging scheme a sure thing was willful failure. College kids weren’t paid to play back then. Turned out one of them knew some gamblers from the old neighborhood, who could entice him and some other players on the cheap, $500 to $1,000 a game. (To earn more, they’d have to place bets, like the scheme’s other insiders.) Hill and the Mafia’s nationwide gambling tentacles raised the stakes: insiders banked $250,000 betting against BC (about $1.25 million in today’s dollars). They made sure the players knew that, after they’d sold themselves once, the mob owned them.

The BC point-shaving scandal was a bigger story than it might otherwise have been because, not long before, college basketball had nearly self-immolated. In 1950, the City College of New York’s storied grand-slam team was caught in a point-shaving scandal that stretched back four years. CCNY had been the only team ever to win both the National Invitational Tournament (then the crown jewel of college hoops) and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) championship (forerunner of today’s billion-dollar March Madness extravaganza). The shocking revelations implicated more than 30 players from seven different schools. CCNY’s sports programs collapsed, and college basketball never recovered in the Big Apple, its natural home turf. The college game survived by building from the ground up in the South and West; it thrived, under the NCAA’s more engaged eye, by treating gambling like the plague.

It was not a new lesson. Still getting established, Major League Baseball risked fading into irrelevance after the 1919 scandal in which the national pastime’s most talented team, the Chicago White Sox, threw the World Series. Did the emergence of Babe Ruth, a historic talent, save the game? Perhaps . . . but there was a game left to save only because, even after several of the “Black Sox” were acquitted of criminal charges, the players were banned for life by the legendary Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who was retained by the owners to be baseball’s first commissioner and the scourge of gambling. The experience of near extinction spooked MLB for generations. Only in 2025, with respect for gambling’s corruptive tendencies on the wane, was Pete Rose, history’s most prolific hitter, made eligible for Hall of Fame enshrinement — one year after he died and 36 years after he was cast out of the sport for betting on the games.

America’s love of athletic competition sits in constant tension with its gambling bug. In small, friendly doses, betting on the games can be fun; it can stir interest in nonfans. But we also know — and no one knows it better than the leagues — that the golden goose will die if the public doubts that the competition is real. In the mid- to late 20th century, that fear intensified. The ostracism of the scandal-plagued college players in 1950 was real, but the jail sentences (typically under six months) were minor. By 1981, however, BC ringleader Rick Kuhn was sentenced to ten years in federal prison, and Hill’s gangster partner James “Jimmy the Gent” Burke got twice that.

In The Game They Played, his scintillating 1977 book on the CCNY outrage, Stanley Cohen explains why basketball was especially prone to gambling corruption. He couldn’t have known it, but he was presaging today’s phenomenon of live sports betting:

Since the creation of the point spread in the forties, basketball has been an exceptionally attractive proposition for gamblers. The score changes by the minute in basketball, in increments of one, two, and three points, and if one has a bet on a game, he can watch his fortunes rise and decline dozens of times during the course of a single contest. It is like watching the cylinders of a slot machine spin swiftly before coming to rest one at a time, poised for the next pull of the handle.

Online books now infuse every sport with not only the intoxication of watching those cylinders spin swiftly but also the frisson of chancing them again and again. A winning bet is just the start of a roll, while the loser figures he can instantly recoup. For a not insignificant minority of gamblers, it results in abuse and addiction. Growing evidence attests that the most vulnerable are the young, who are clueless about the peril, and the poor, who are least able to afford it.

All in all, for a century after the Black Sox scandal, and with occasional, hygienic reminders of the dangers, sports leagues did a fairly good job of cordoning off gambling. In 2018, however, the Supreme Court invalidated the 1992 Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act. The justices reasoned that PASPA, which had essentially restricted legal sports betting to Nevada, was an unconstitutional commandeering of states to enforce federal policy. Sportsbooks and live betting rose meteorically.

The aftermath has seen an increasing stream of gambling scandals and suspensions in football, baseball, and basketball at the pro and college levels, pro hockey and soccer, golf, and mixed martial arts. In just the past few months, willful underperformance has combined with live gambling to produce the sports equivalent of “insider trading”: players and coaches allegedly sharing intelligence (including medical information) about whether team stars would play in that day’s game, about the players’ plans to limit their own playing time by faking injuries, and about their intention to make bad plays at agreed-on times.

In 2024, for example, Jontay Porter of the National Basketball Association’s Toronto Raptors was banned for life from the NBA for betting on games and alerting co-conspirators that he would curtail his playing time, allowing associates to win wagers on his underperformance. Porter pled guilty to wire fraud and is looking at a four-year prison stint.

In late October, federal prosecutors charged three dozen people, including pro basketball stars and coaches, in two indictments. One involved Terry Rozier, who, as a Charlotte Hornets shooting guard, pulled himself out of a 2023 game after just nine minutes — allegedly allowing an associate to win a big “under” bet on his projected statistics. Former NBA player Damon Jones, while an unofficial assistant coach for the Los Angeles Lakers, is accused of alerting his gambling co-conspirators that some of the team’s star players would sit out games because of injuries that hadn’t been publicly disclosed, enabling them to cash in on big wagers.

Shortly after those charges were announced, prosecutors unsealed the indictment against two Cleveland Guardians pitchers: Emmanuel Clase, perhaps baseball’s best reliever, and starter Luis Ortiz. Clase is said to have intentionally thrown pitches out of the strike zone and below his normal speed at agreed-on times, allowing his associates to make real-time prop bets, collect thousands of dollars in winnings, and kick a percentage back to Clase. When the scheme proved it would pay dividends, Clase allegedly recruited Ortiz, who did the same thing. Like the NBA celebrities, the pitchers have pleaded not guilty.

Suddenly alarmed at the utterly foreseeable corruption, MLB officials have beseeched their sportsbook partners to limit prop bets based on pitches. As their product is sullied — as their cognizance of the gambling threat is overcome by their salivation over the gambling dollars — their rebuttal is predictable, too: the legalized betting world is a panacea, you see, because wagering is so transparent that suspicious bets are swiftly identified and action is taken. It’s not like the bad old days when the mobsters conspired in stealth with rogue players.

This is delusional. Legalized betting, real-time online wagering starting at just a few dollars a pitch or a pass, has hooked oceans of bettors into an industry formerly limited to a few dank ponds. If suspicious bets are surfacing, it’s because the books are everywhere — including on college campuses, which makes a mockery of laws that purport to make betting illegal for those under 21. As you’d expect — unless your financial incentive was to look the other way — the related pathologies are running rampant: gambling addiction, increased alcohol consumption and substance abuse, and depression, all leading to an explosion of calls to helplines.

The culture of gambling among athletes, where performance intersects with pathology, is especially difficult to examine. The leagues, the teams, the players’ agents, and the networks and streaming services that pay billions to broadcast the games and pocket the ad revenue have a powerful incentive to shield the players and the product from inquiry. Still, we are talking about big-time athletes — in the main, hypercompetitive men with disposable income that would have been unimaginable in the mid- to late 20th century. Most come to the pros from American universities, where the incidence of sports gambling is now so high that it would be naïve to assume that the players who come out of those schools are immune.

The career of Shohei Ohtani, baseball’s phenomenal talent, was threatened by his settling of an astonishing $16 million in gambling debts. (An investigation concluded that Ohtani was embezzled by a Japanese translator who was covering his own huge losses.) The Los Angeles Dodgers star vehemently denied personal involvement in gambling: in his world of wealth, dependence on aides, and proximity to wagering, the millions missing from his holdings simply went unnoticed. Meanwhile, one of the recent indictments charged Basketball Hall of Famer Chauncey Billups and other NBA figures with drawing individuals into high-stakes gambling rings run by organized crime. And while the teams and leagues are indefatigable in peddling ads and on-site sportsbooks to induce fans to gamble, they quietly ban wagering in the locker room and team facilities.

They know they’re playing with fire. And it’s starting to burn.