On April 18, 2024, the NBA officially announced that Raptors player Jonte Porter was banned for life for participating in gambling. Graham Potter is not the first player to be banned for betting on football, but the last player to be banned for betting on football was back in 1954.
So, what happened 70 years ago?
At 6 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 9, 1954, Pistons owner Fred Zorner invited several Pistons players to his home under the pretext of "chatting about the upcoming All-Star." Rookie Jack Molinas, who was drafted with the third pick in the first round, was among them.
Born in New York to a middle-class Jewish family, Molinas is 1.98 meters tall and plays as a forward, led the team to win the New York championship in high school, studied at Columbia University for four years, became the captain of the team, and broke the team's all-time scoring and rebounding records. After entering the NBA, Molinas only played less than half a season, which was enough to make himself selected for the 4th All-Star in 1954 hosted by New York, which shows his strength.
Zorna smoked a cigar and said a few idle words about the all-star schedule, then his face suddenly sank and said: "There are some rumors outside that there are people in our team who bet on football." President Podorov asked us to get to the bottom of something tonight. That's why I'm inviting you to come. ”
In fact, Podorov was also on the plane to Zorgna's house at this time. Podorov, who is less than 1.5 meters tall, was the first president of the NBA, and it was he who facilitated the merger of the BAA and the NBL in 1949 to create what would become the NBA. Soon after the creation of the NBA, Podorov enshrined anti-gambling laws in collective bargaining agreements. In 1951, Podorov fired referee Saul Ravi for being "incompetent", but in 1950 Ravi accepted the gambling money. In the fall of the same year, Podoloff also imposed a lifetime ban on two key players of the Indianapolis Olympians for their involvement in match-fixing in college, a ban that led to the disbandment of the Olympians the following year.
Even so, the Pistons before the 1951 All-Star Game were not clean in the eyes of the bookmakers, and they hadn't been on the market for two weeks, which sparked the ensnaring operation, in which Molinas was handcuffed back to the local police station and interrogated by FBI commissioners. The interrogation lasted until 2 a.m., when Molinas finally signed a dictation admitting that he had bet on the Pistons game, but all of it was on his team to win, and never let his team lose.
After Podorov obtained a copy of his confession, he immediately announced that Molinas would be banned for life, declaring that "Molinas has a slight gambling behavior of betting on his own team to win".
This is a very crucial wording, because players betting on their own team to win and betting on their own team to lose are very different in connotation, the former is simply participating in betting, and the latter refers to another kind of behavior: match-fixing.
According to the league's bylaws, the NBA was supposed to hold a hearing on Molinas' gambling behavior, but Podorov canceled the hearing. At the time, a prosecutor also intended to investigate Molinas in depth, but insiders revealed that Podorov used his personal connections to prevent further investigations.
So the 1954 Molinas gambling case sank to the bottom of the water, and the NBA completed a perfect crisis PR because of a "trivial gambling behavior" The expulsion of a promising young All-Star shows how much they hate gambling behavior, and how fair their game is, in fact, Podorov did secretly carry out anti-gambling activities, installed internal response in the team, installed bugs in the locker room or office, and other things, until 1957, President Bo also sent a memo to all teams in the league, saying that he had the evidence that some players were involved in match-fixing, and hoped that they would rat the tail juice and leave some dignity for themselves. That year, 36 players left the league at the end of the season by voluntarily retiring.
And Molinas himself, although expelled from the League, was not punished more in the justice system, and he was acquitted.
But the story of Molinas is not over. While on trial, Molinas applied to the spring classes of Brooklyn Law School, and when Molinas was acquitted, he officially became a law student at the college. Next, Molinas began his legal practice. In seven years, Molinas graduated from law school, joined a law firm, and went to other minor leagues as a coach and player, averaging 30 points per game, while at the same time, he continued to appeal on various grounds, asking the court to force the NBA to withdraw his life ban, allow him to return to the league, and compensate himself for the 5,000 yuan in wages he lost after the gambling case, and pay $50,000 in emotional compensation. After these appeals hit a wall repeatedly, Molinas and other lawyers sued the NBA under antitrust law, this time seeking up to $3 million in damages. Not surprisingly, the indictment was still dismissed, and years later Molinas told reporters that he had been lied to, "Podorov said that we are all Jews, Jews do not lie to Jews, and he promised me that as long as I finish law, I can return to the Union." ”
Of course, seven years of constantly suing the NBA may have been a small amusement for Molinas in his spare time, as he discovered that the world outside the NBA had a lot to offer. Between 1957 and 1961, Molinas reached out to college campuses and manipulated more than 27 sporting events with money and sex, eventually triggering the "1961 College Sports Match-fixing Case", which involved more than 43 games, involving 476 college athletes, and a total of 37 players were arrested.
Molinas's method is mainly to stuff black gold into college players, such as stuffing a star player with $1,000, and then Molinas can sell the results of his desired game as a resource to gamblers for $10,000, and then bet a few thousand dollars himself, making $50,000 a week very easily. It is important to know that in that era, not to mention college players, the average annual income of NBA players was only about $10,000, and McCann's $13,000 was the highest income in 1954. Molinas was able to make $50,000 a week during this period, which is a sudden rich. 70 years later, Jonte Porter earned $2.4 million playing in the NBA, but only made $20,000 from gambling, which is a bit indescribable compared to Molinas.
Outside of basketball, Molinas has dabbled in a lot of things, including having a boxer drugged to manipulate the outcome of a match, and once attaching a remote buzzer to the tail of a racehorse to stimulate the race. Most classicly, Molinas also completed time travel, he controlled the current intensity of the betting hall of the casino through his connections in the United Edison company, and the tiny change of current was not easy to detect, but it allowed Molinas to still be able to place bets at the moment when the result of the game was released.
After the 1961 college sports match-fixing case broke out, Molinas was imprisoned as the first offender and sentenced to 10-15 years in prison and deprived of his lawyer's bar. But even in prison, Molinas continued to participate in a scheme to forge checks using a signature machine...... After being released, Molinas moved to Los Angeles to live with an AV actress, turned into an A-film director, and started an underground pornography business, and the film was sold as far as Taiwan, China.
Of course, all stories come to an end, when one of Molinas' business partners died in an accident in 1975, and guess who got $300,000 out of his life insurance? We don't know if Molinas spent all the $300,000, because a few months after he got the money, the 43-year-old Molinas was shot dead in his backyard by the mafia.
On the surface, Molinas is the only liar and gambler in this story, but on closer inspection, there are others who are more sophisticated, and Podorov, the first president of the League, clearly has more cunning methods of deception. 70 years ago, there were only 9 teams in the NBA, a ticket was sold for less than $2, almost all teams were losing money, and the revenue of the entire league was extremely bleak, almost on the verge of collapse. Podorov declared that "everything is just Molinas' personal behavior" and launched a crackdown internally, and the NBA finally survived the match-fixing turmoil.
Seventy years later, with 30 teams in the league, basketball revenues are at an all-time high, and future revenues are likely to double as far as the naked eye can see. The league's current president, Xiao Hua, issued the same ban and told a similar lie: "We believe everything is just Potter's personal behavior." It's just that we know very well that the background of these two things is completely different, and now the NBA has openly embraced betting, and it is true that Porter is a personal behavior, but who knows how many "individuals" are "acting"?