In this episode of CrimeWaves, we interview the investigative journalist Cathy Scott, who one year after Tupac’s murder essentially solved the case. She speaks about the incredible incompetency and complacency of the Las Vegas Police. A must listen to understand how American law enforcement system, too often, functions.

Below is a transcript of an excellent interview with Cathy Scott, produced by my amazing students Akin Akinwunmi and Angie Paulus. For the actual podcast interview you can hear it here:

**

Reading from Compton Street Legend by Duane ‘Keffe D’ Davis

I pulled out the Glock that Zip had given me and tossed it in the backseat. Bubble Up did the driving Baby Lane and Freaky were riding in the back.
After our pit stop at the Liquor Barn we continued towards the carriage house. As we were driving the two vehicles that were with us got caught at the traffic light but we kept rolling. A few blocks down we were sitting at the light and who the fuck did we see? The Death Row caravan hit the corner with Tupac hanging out the window of a black luxury BMW waving to his fans. People on the street were screaming, “Tupac, Tupac! We love you Tupac!”

In unison all of our heads turned

Declan Hill:

Let’s just get right into this September 7th, 1996, streets of Vegas. What happens?

Cathy Scott:

Tupac Shakur was driving in, in um, Suge Knight, his record producer of Death Row Records was driving him to a club club 6 62 where, uh, Tupac was going to be performing.

There were lots of flyers out, KCE, uh, KCET, which is a really popular, , black owned, uh, radio show in Las Vegas, was, you know, blasting it all day long, all week, actually, everybody knew that’s where Tupac was going, so he, he was headed down Flamingo, and, uh, got, was on the strip, headed off, uh, Flamingo, um, Suge Knight was driving, was stop and go, stop and go.

It’s fight night. You know, Bruce Seldon was fighting Mike Tyson that night. It was a knockout. Tupac had just gone. Everybody’s hyped up. Tupac was coming in and out of his, um, moon roof, sunroof and, um, a white Cadillac drove up and, and an arm stuck out and went rat-a-tat-tat like Bonnie and Clyde and just shot into the car door.

**

Declan Hill:

Tupac Shakur was one of the most popular recording artists of his time. He was killed in his absolute prime, and since then his popularity has grown.

Yet it took the Las Vegas police force 27 years to arrest anyone for the murder. And as you’ll hear, part of the delay was that they considered any attention on the media as bad for the business of Vegas, i. e. gambling and the tourists who fuel it. Now, the official slowness was even more extraordinary because a young investigative journalist, Had more or less solved the crime in less than a year.

She brought out a book, The Killing of Tupac Shakur, on the first anniversary of his death in September 1997, that correctly identifies the man who killed him and his motive for the murder. Yet her investigative work was ignored by Las Vegas law enforcement. And stranger still, the man who claimed to have organized the shooting, wrote his own book, Compton Street Legend, and published it in 2019.

And yet still no one was arrested for the murder. And it begs the question, what do you have to do in Vegas to get arrested? Now, [00:04:00] all that was true until last year when a new sheriff rode into Vegas and decided to clean up the town, starting with that famous decades old murder, the Vegas police arrested the former Compton gangster.

And his trial will be coming up in 2025. So today on crime waves, we interview that great journalist, Cathy Scott. We also excerpt her interview with selections from the book, Compton street legend by Keefe D. Davis. So you can hear in his own words, What he alleges happened that night. Now some of the people you’ll hear being mentioned are Suge Knight, the CEO of Death Row Records, that’s Tupac’s music company, Orlando Anderson, AKA Baby Lane, the alleged killer of Tupac.After those two got into a fight in the hallway of the MGM casino following a Mike Tyson boxing match.

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Reading from Compton Street Legend by Duane ‘Keffe D’ Davis

After the match we headed to the pre-arranged meeting place where we had waited for about 15 minutes Little by little everybody started showing up except my nephew Then some 118 East Coast Crips came and told us that they had saw some death row niggas jump on my nephew down by the casino We came to find out later that the same dude from the Lakewood Mall that got his chain snatched was the was walking with Tupac when they had saw Baby Lane in the lobby of the MGM We rushed up out the cafe and we went to the Baby Lane We saw him inside the MGM minutes after they had jumped him

By the time we had got there Suge and their crew had left Baby Lane’s shoulder was a little messed up but other than that he was all right

When I asked him what happened he said, “Them Death Row niggas rushed me.”

**

Declan Hill

Now, at that time, Tupac is probably what the world’s biggest recording star.

Walk me through who he was at that time.

Cathy Scott:

He was really bigger than life on me, you know, he hadn’t yet. I don’t think he saw his full potential he was already speaking at universities and that sort of thing too, but he was on top of the game, as far as rap went he was on Suge Knight and death row records, the top seller.

And, um, so he was big and was doing a lot of, a lot of performance, uh, performances on stage and that sort of thing. But his records were selling like crazy and, um, he, it was, his new record was coming out the next day or within a day or two. So he was, uh, Makaveli it was called. And, um, so he was. Hyped up because [00:08:00] that that was, um, just dropping and but he had to go to the club 662 to perform because he was working off some, you know, it’s a bad boy too.

But anyway, he, um, so he had to, had to perform that night as community service and everybody knew he was going, it was all over the radio. So, so these guys were looking for him in the, in the black Cadillac cause they knew he was going.

So they just started heading down Flamingo, went to the club, came back, made a Uwe, got back on Flamingo and boom, they came across. Tupac, his windows were down, he was standing up and down, so they knew it was him. and the shooter just fired into the passenger seat.

**

Reading from Compton Street Legend by Duane ‘Keffe D’ Davis

We couldn’t let no record company studio gangsters do us like that. Had they lost their rapping ass fucking minds?!
On top of that Puffy had already talked to me about helping him out with the problem that he had been having with them niggas. It was a double whammy then. You add on top of the fact that we helped Suge with the money to get his record business going. And a nigga was gonna bite the hand that fed him?
Add insult to injury cause Suge still hadn’t paid Boss Man his money back. Got too big for his briches to stop taking Boss Man’s calls. Strike three homie!
Throw that out, Fuck that big homie! We know what them niggas gonna be…

**

Declan Hill:

So there’s a fight between Orlando Anderson and Tupac and his entourage. Tell us about that fight and why it was significant.

Cathy Scott:

Was Suge left with, they left with some of their homies, some, some low level rappers, you know, uh, everybody always calls that Tupac’s entourage, Suge’s entourage.

They left the MGM Grand, they left the, uh, arena where the fight with, where the boxing match was held. And then they headed toward the front door, which if you’re in one of those mega casinos, you’ll know that they’re, they take a long time to walk through. And, um, so as they were walking, um, , one of the guys with,, Tupac goes, Hey, says to Tupac, “Hey, that’s Lando. He’s the one who stole my bracelet at the, uh, shoe store!: in wherever. So there was a bounty to get a Death Row necklace, which was an electric chair. It was gold and it was an electric chair, you know, a, um, when you kill what’s a death row, literally a death row chair.

And solid gold big old honking chain, and they ripped it off of his neck and he goes, “Oh that’s Lando he’s the one who stole it from me.”

And so, Suge and Tupac just start pounding on. Orlando, Orlando was leaning against the, uh, against the elevator, right next to the elevator wall, waiting for his buddies from, you know, from Compton, South Central, uh, because they went in, he didn’t have a ticket, so he was waiting for them. It’s not like he was waiting, he didn’t, you look at the video in advance, he’s just bored, he’s just waiting for them to come in.

Not, not, not Tupac to come. So, you know, if not for Tupac’s buddy, seeing him, we wouldn’t be talking about this right now. But, uh, so they’d start pouncing and punching in.

Declan Hill:

These guys are prominent, if you can use that word, or at least, um, fully patched up members of street gangs.

Cathy Scott:

Yes.

Declan Hill

And if you beat one of those guys up, there’s going to be repercussions. You don’t get to do that in that, in that gang world. Because if you do, you know, there’s, there’s a lack of respect and there’s going to be blood on the streets.

Cathy Scott:

It’s all motive, uh, motive opportunity. [00:12:00] And, um, means, so you’ve got to get a gun. So Keefe D and Orlando, everybody was ticked off. And so their thing was, let’s go pay him back, we know where he’s going to be.

And so they, he bought a gun. Keefe D, who’s in jail right now, took, like you said, 27 years. He’s in jail for an accessory. He bought the gun. He handed it to Orlando in the car. So he goes out and buys it on the street or a gun shop. They’re open 24 hours in Vegas, wherever he got it from, and, um, a Glock. 45, I think it was, and then let’s go find, let’s go find Pac.

And so they start driving around and they find him. All it was, was retaliation. It’s as simple as that. There’s no conspiracy. It was you did this to me. As you said, you did this to me. I’m going to do this to you is payback. It’s all of us.

Declan Hill:

It’s none of that, um, you know, [00:13:00] East Coast rappers versus West Coast rappers and that whole thing that dominated popular media and which, I’ve got to say, sold a lot of records.

Cathy Scott:

Yes, it did. Yeah, it sold a lot of records, but, but, you know, I look at, I look at facts and evidence, and I don’t listen to the, you know, all the noise. I mean, I interviewed a ton of people, um, and then you, you know, I interviewed, uh, Reggie Wright, who owned the security company with them, and, you know, security, they were told they couldn’t carry guns.

because they didn’t, they didn’t apply in advance for a permit. You can’t, you can’t carry it in Vegas without a permit. And so they, they couldn’t carry. So the security, they were like security guards, like guys you see outside an AT& T store, you know?

**
Reading from Compton Street Legend by Duane ‘Keffe D’ Davis

There the motherfuckers go right there. If Pac had not been hanging out the window, we would have never seen him.
“Bust a U! Bust a U!
Babe busted a U-turn.

As they sat in the traffic we slowly rode past the long line of luxury cars they had in the caravan looking into each one until we pulled up to the front vehicle and found who we were seeking for. Like two ramps locking horns, Suge and I looked dead in each other’s eyes. Our eyes locked. A terrified expression on Suge’s face read, “Damn Them niggas!”
No words exchanged. The time for talking had passed. Shit was about to go down.

**

Declan Hill:

Cathy, one of the things I, I made my students do was, was read, At the beginning of your book, uh, an excellent book written in extraordinarily short amount of time.

The, you know, the first edition comes out in September, 1997, one year after it, it’s come back in 2002, [00:15:00] came back in 2015. And I hope it gets reissued soon, um, with this recent trial because you basically lay out what happened within less than a year. you lay out essentially what was going on. , I’m persuaded by all this media nonsense about East coast, West coast rappers and stuff.

You just said, this is it. However, at the heart of your book is that the Las Vegas police department. screwed up again and again and again on the night of the scene on the investigation, all kinds of things. Could you just give us a short quick list of what they did wrong?

Cathy Scott:

Well, one of the big things they did wrong was you had all these witnesses.

I’m part of Tupac’s entourage. Those are like three cars a guy. And so they’re, Suge ends up on this strip. And so, so do they, they end up following him. Um, the guys who were in the entourage, you know, backup singers and some of the outlaws who backed up Tupac and these are kids, you know, [00:16:00] they’re 18, 19.

They’re young. And, um, and so what is, what did the Metro and I went down, right, I was down there about 2 AM. I got a call, and this happened about 11:30, I think. So I was at the scene while forensics were still on. So what did they do? All the cars that show up following Suge, you know, cause Suge was injured.

He’s bleeding. They, they, there’s another major, major thing that went wrong. So they, pulled them out of their cars and lay them face down on the ground, you know, and then they put them on, on the curbside and have them just sit apart from each other. So they come and talk to each other. That is not the way you treat a witness.

And, uh, you know, I hate to say it, but I think it’s the color of their skin. And then what Suge Knight did he got out of the car Tupac’s door wanted open. So a police officer helped him and the two of them got the door open. They should have waited. And then they had to squeeze Tupac out. He was shot in the chest

Declan Hill:

He’s bleeding to death and there’s no EMT.

Cathy Scott:

Well, the EMTs came, um, they came, but not before these guys had him out on the ground. So what did they, what damage was done to Tupac as they’re dragging and pulling his body down on the ground? Tupac was still talking at that time and in, in the car, the last thing he said to, uh, Well, in the ambulance, Suge rode with him because he was injured. You know, he said, “You’re a, you’re a hit man, you’re hit.”

And he goes, “Me? You’re the one who got hit.”

And that’s the last thing, that’s the last thing Tupac said. But I think they caused damage. But the police, then they expect the same people. Then they told me, “Well, no one will talk to you.” The lieutenant told me, the lieutenant of homicide.

Well, no one would talk to us. I said, “Why? Because you put them on the ground face down and then you expect them to talk to you?”

You know, they, they don’t, um, and then I was told, and then I got calls from, from the media in New York and all over the place, big magazines, writers, why, um, Why aren’t the police talking to us?

They won’t talk to us. Well, they would only talk to local media. And so they just, the one, uh, a captain at the time told me, he said, and you know, I just said it before that, um, that a big trial like this would be bad for tourism, you know, all these gang members and rah, hip hop people coming in, bad for tourism, so they just.

They, they honestly thought, the sergeant at one time told me, they honestly thought if they ignored it, it would go away, and that just fueled it, and it got worse, and then all the conspiracy theories come up. It was an easy case to solve. They never interviewed Orlando, I think it took him a few months and I think they asked him what kind of coffee he liked.

So funny they didn’t. It was just shabby all the way and it was intentional.

Declan Hill:

It was so shabby in terms of crime scene analysis here at the University of New Haven. We’re one of the best universities in the world because we have really good former police officers, forensics guys, um, all kinds of people teaching our students about crime scene analysis.

And, and so it boggled my mind that there was only one crime scene analyst on the scene. There was no securing of the scene. There were bike cops. There were two bike cops chasing the victim. These guys in their BMW and their little bicycles down the street. It just seemed like mall cops, you know, being called into a shooting, like guys, you know, go arrest someone for having a lollipop, but just leave the big people stuff away.

Cathy Scott:

Coincidentally, [00:20:00] two bike cops were up on the fourth or fifth floor of the parking garage right there next to the hotel was on the other side and they were literally vertical with it. And so they heard the pop pop pop, and they started running they had their bike their bicycles and they started running.

So, they both. Their shooting happened there. They heard the shooting. They left the scene. One bike cop left to follow Suge to the strip, but the other one went with him. One of them should have stayed, stayed at the scene. You know, I mean, they left, and then Suge left too, but that’s the scene of the crime and you don’t leave it.

Declan Hill:

These are bike cops! Think of all, you think of all the bystanders who just. Walked away, not not the guys in the entourage, not the guys in the cars, but just it was right in the middle of strip right in the middle of a Saturday night fight night and hundreds of people would watch that. And the opportunity just to secure them at that moment.

Yeah, memories are still fresh was all gone.

Cathy Scott:

Yeah, they’re not half a block off the strip but they they Yeah, they needed to secure the crime and they didn’t. So how many cars went by? How many, you know, where were the shells of the bullets they should have secured and yellow tape. And I mean, those guys, their turn, bicycle cops aren’t security cops.

They’re, they’re trained just like regular cops. It’s kind of a first gig. It’s an entry level. But, and I interviewed one of the bike cops, not one of the cops was there, but the bike cop who was at the scene of where Suge ended up. So then you end up. Crime scenes, they should have secured in they didn’t.

, you know, they’ve got a gang. They’ve got a gang team that they didn’t homicide did not bring in the gang teams.

You know, they’re all over. Okay. No, the gang, detectives were not a part of the investigation, even though it was gang related.

Declan Hill:

Hang on. I’m just about to fall off my chair again. You saying there was actually at that time, there was [00:22:00] actually a gang team in Vegas that they didn’t bring in?!

Cathy Scott:

They did not bring in the gang unit. Now maybe they did. With this investigation, the one that’s actually got, you know, Keefe . in jail and charged with murder, they may have brought them back in. They did not bring in the gang cops. They felt a little left out. I interviewed some of them, but, um, yeah.

Well, if you don’t want to solve a crime, you don’t bring in people like that…

**
Reading from Compton Street Legend by Duane ‘Keffe D’ Davis

The next few seconds all happened so quickly. Shit was on!

Tupac made an erratic move and began to reach down beneath the seat. It was the first and only time in my life that I could relate to the police command, “Keep your hands where I can see them.”

Instead Pac pulled out the strap. And that’s when the fireworks started.

One of my guys from the backseat grabbed the Glock and started busting back. The first shot skinned Suge in the head, thought the motherfucker was dead. I heard stories that Suge supposedly used Tupac as a shield when the bullets started flying but that’s some bullshit! Suge was already wounded. It was the first one that got touched us.

**

Declan Hill:

And that quote, justice was, was happening quickly. Here’s the thing. I fell off my chair many times reading your book. It’s absolutely superb. And I strongly recommend our listeners and viewers to get Cathy’s book. Cathy’s written a number of them, but they’re all exceptional. And, but this work that you’ve done is really, really extraordinary.

But one of the things that stunned me in your research was you were saying that there were members of the Las Vegas police department that were actually moonlighting that night as quote bodyguards for Tupac and his and his group. Tell us about that.

Cathy Scott:

I think there were eight of them. Um, that’s, uh, I’d have to refresh my memory, but they’re, um, you know, big bodybuilders and that sort of thing.

So they’re allowed police, police officers around the nation do it, you know, around the U S do it. And, um, you [00:24:00] know, it’s to make more money. It’s a side gig. So they got hired out as security guards. Um, But they were told, as I said earlier, nobody was allowed to carry that night. And, um, and security guards are off.

If they hire out as a security guard, they’re off duty. So they’re more show than anything else, but they were with them and they were in a car behind and they, and I think there were a couple of them waiting for them at Club 662 where Tupac was performing, but there were some with them in the entourage.

They had gone, left the MGM to go, you know, change their clothes, hang out, and then, and then head to club 662. And after they did all that, then they, so those guards were not police officers, but they, they could have performed as police officers, but they didn’t, they, there was no from them at all.

Declan Hill:

Yeah. And here’s my problem, Cathy.

I mean, that is a walking, talking conflict of interest.

Cathy Scott:

Oh yeah.

Declan Hill:

Particularly, Anderson, particularly when you have a fight a few hours earlier between Orlando Anderson, uh, Southside Crip and, uh, the guys around Tupac. It is some controversy whether he was actually a named member of the Bloods or not, but let’s say he was not.

Cathy Scott:

No, no. Tupac never jumped into a game. Never.

Declan Hill:

Right. So, but there’s certainly a fight there.

Cathy Scott:

The cops who are, quote, off duty are somewhat around this. Yet this hugely significant fight. Three hours before he’s killed is, is ignored by the Vegas police for seven, eight days. Um, they don’t use these guys to bring people in to say, Hey, you know, I was in the car with you.

You know, can we work together, some kind of entourage that it just seems like they wanted this whole issue to go away. That being the Vegas police.

Well, I would tell you the Keystone cops, there [00:26:00] was just one mistake after another another. And yeah, the cops who were off duty, but it called it in. And because there wasn’t and there was a cop that actually took, you know, took his statement, but didn’t write it down, didn’t even do a report.

So there was no record of it other than, um, video being leaked to the media from the MGM Grand. Otherwise we would have never known about all of that, you know, that there it is in public with the date and everything. So we, it was a matter of piecing together what people were leaking to us rather than what we were getting from the police because the police kept telling me, oh, it was, you know, unrelated and just trying to make it go away.

It was almost, it was almost comical, which is why I wrote the book. I wrote the book. Because the police were not solving it in the standard way that they typically do. It just looked weird. And, and so that’s why I, um, you know, I was there [00:27:00] in Vegas and, um, and I was a police reporter and I, I’d gone to the scene of the crime.

And so I, uh, I was at the hospital when Tupac died. It was a somber, somber moment, but and that changed everything when it became a homicide instead of an attempted homicide. But it didn’t, um, seven days, six days later, he died. It did not, um, prompt the police to speed it up or, you know, do more. It just, uh, they just wanted it to go away.

But I didn’t, I kept it out there.

**
Reading from Compton Street Legend by Duane ‘Keffe D’ Davis

As the rounds continued flying I dug down so that I wouldn’t get hit. When the shooting stopped we boned out. And a white Chrysler Seabreeze full of young ladies was following us. Their window quickly got shot out. So they stopped. Interesting thing to me was with all them rough-ass niggas they were supposed to have with them [00:28:00] none of them did a damn thing and tried to come after us.

**

Declan Hill:

Spell this out for myself and the listeners. What is the difference between the Compton police, and for anyone who’s a non American Compton is an area of Los Angeles, notorious for gang warfare. So talk us through the difference between the Compton cops and the Las Vegas and Henderson police forces.

Cathy Scott:

I think part of it. When Compton PD as you said, because these guys live in Compton, so they knew who they were they knew all the players, they were reaching out I interviewed them the length, they became friends, and one of them has since died one of the cops but they.

They immediately contacted the police and then they, they’re the ones who ID’d Orlando for them because the security and the police officer at the MGM Grand didn’t even take the police report. So he didn’t know who he was talking to. And it was the Compton PD who really said, Hey, listen, we’ll help you.

And they’re like, we don’t need any help. And they, and they were perplexed.

They offered. Let us help you. And they said, No, we’re fine. And so that’s when they picked up the phone and called me and said, What is going on? All these people.

Declan Hill:

Sorry, the Compton cops. In California, hundreds of miles away, but these are the gangbangers. These are the guys they know must be involved in this crime very, very early on hours, days after the things are volunteering information to Vegas police and the Vegas police are turning them down!?

Cathy Scott:

It turned because they knew all of them. They knew they knew Orlando Anderson, Lando. They knew him. You know, Orlando got dead himself about 18 months later in an unrelated, uh, shooting at a, at a, um, at a car wash, but I investigated that as well, just to make sure that that wasn’t like a cover up, you know, and it was retaliation.

It wasn’t retaliation. It was just, you did this to me, you shoot me, I’m going to shoot you, just a car to car shooting in the parking lot of a car wash over money It was over money.

Declan Hill:

But there was in the 10 days after the shooting of Tupac blood on the streets in Compton, at least 12 blood bath. Tell us about that, please.

Cathy Scott:

Well, that was. So, so Suge Knight’s a blood, the, the Piru gang. Um, and, and then Orlando Anderson’s a Crip, so you’ve got the South, South Central Crips and you’ve got the Bloods and they all live in the same neighborhoods, you know, and so, or nearby, and there’s territory. And so, Suge Knight ordered it, and, and it was so, so clear out Compton, so they went, they did get one of the guys who was in the car when Tupac was, because there were four people in the car, and, um, They got him, so he got dead, and then, uh, and that was a bloodbath of about four days, I think, and, and, and those Compton [00:31:00] cops were involved in trying to solve everything, a little boy got shot because they were doing drive bys, that’s what they do, drive bys, they were doing drive bys over in retaliation for Tupac’s shooting, so if justice, the real justice doesn’t take place, then there is justice on the streets sometimes, and that’s what, uh, they were trying to do.

Somehow Suge instead of driving straight to the Memorial Hospital He did some studio gangsta shit He made a U turn back to the Las Vegas Strip Confident that the death row crew and the police would be looking for the car that we were driving in We abandoned the car and got away from it quickly

It’s some shit you would see on the Twilight Zone We scurried to get to the other side of the Las Vegas Boulevard When we got to the middle of the divider the light changed to red And we had to wait on the median as we were standing on the median waiting to cross Las Vegas Boulevard two ambulances passed by right in front of where we were standing with the sirens blaring.

Declan Hill:

You, you kept it out there because you did Over 200 interviews, [00:32:00] uh, you continue those interviews long term, you built relationships, you went to LA, you went to Compton, you went all around, uh, all this area, all this world, all this culture, getting it. And again, as I said, I was shocked to see that within less than a year, you had essentially solved the case.

What’s your feelings now, all these years later, 27 years later, when you see somebody finally being arrested?

Cathy Scott:

Oh, I’m, I’m, you know, I applaud them, you know, and the new one coming in and some, some people, I got a lot of calls. I was on TV and stuff. All the TV programs wanted to know, are you surprised by the outcome?

And I’m like, no, because I knew he was the one who bought the gun. I knew he was involved. He’s Orlando’s uncle. You know, he was a part of it. He said, let’s go get him. Um, so yeah, he’s charged with murder. So I was just pleased that finally, but it took a new, new sheriff in town to, to do it and new attitude.

And guys who weren’t even probably on the force back then are now new to it. And so it’s a homicide guys. All those guys are probably retired by now. I know a lot of them are. So it’s a, it’s, it’s new blood coming in and, and we, and reexamining it. But, one of the reasons is because Keefe D. – Keefe Davis and all his, um, infinite wisdom, as the guy who provided the gun, moved from Compton to Henderson, Nevada, and, and so they didn’t have to extradite him, which they would have had to go through the Las Vegas police, or I’m sorry, the, um, L. A. police. It’s a contents no longer a police department, by the way, it, it folded.

I had to go through the LAPD, the court system in LA to extradite. This was easy. He so they just put surveillance on him almost as soon as he moved there.

They got him the first time they arrested him because they arrested him twice. But the first time they arrested him, they got him walking his dog. So he wasn’t at all, you know, thinking, “Oh, I’m going to get caught because I’m back in town.”

Dude, you made it easy for them!

Declan Hill:

Well, Cathy, he made it even more easy for them. He wrote a book where he wrote, you know, that’s the thing that’s playing, that’s playing through our, our interview, our interview,

So it even begs the question, “Look, mate, You put out a book in 2019 saying, I drove the car and I was their accessory to this homicide.” What do you have to do in Las Vegas to get arrested?

Cathy Scott:

Yeah, exactly. But you have to move there.

Declan Hill:

Exactly. You have to move there, write a book about it, and then wait five years before the police come around to arrest you.

Cathy Scott:

Yeah, the problem with him was that he didn’t realize that there is no statute of limitations on homicide. I think he thought the case was so old it [00:35:00] was dead. There’s no statute. There’s a statute on theft. There’s statute on every crime. There is no statute. It is until the end of time. And so it didn’t matter how much time went by.

So he basically just handed himself over to the police by moving there. And then they, they read the book and they’re like, let’s go get him.

The first ambulance passed by with Tupac in it and the medics working frantically to provide medical attention The second one not too far behind had Sugar in it

There we were looking right into the ambulances transporting Tupac and Suge to the Memorial Hospital Everyone knows the rest of the story Six days later Tupac died as a result from his injuries

Declan Hill:

At, at that point, uh, Tupac is, um, you know, really one of the major recording stars. So is a young Justin Timberlake. He’s gone now to be, you know, the, I arguably the Frank Sinatra of his generation, just this, this icon. Do you think it would have been different if [00:36:00] Justin Timberlake had been gunned down on the streets of Vegas?

Cathy Scott:

Absolutely.

Declan Hill:

Why?

Cathy Scott:

Because of his skin color, I think, and no gang affiliation. So, because, I mean, you’ve got, um, I was told this. by a higher up in the police department. You bring in a bunch of black gang members, and it’s bad for tourism. And they just wanted, they didn’t want people to know that there were any gang related things going on.

And they literally thought it was a news story that would die after a few days. And that’s, that’s what I, I learned over the years covering this I learned it early on, you know, but permeated through and the difference in is you get a new guy in who’s heading it and the sheriff too he didn’t he didn’t he wouldn’t talk to reporters at the time the sheriff back then sheriff keller and uh but this guy’s an open book This new guy, cause he, he just solved the biggest crime.

And, [00:37:00] and I think ever in Las Vegas, when you say it’s one of the big, I mean, the mob,

Declan Hill:

Cathy. It’s an honor to talk to you. It’s an honor to be able to teach some of your methods, um, in my, in my classes. Um, can you please tell your listeners some of the books that you’re working on now? Because this one that, that kicked off your career as an author, you’d be in a journalist for a long time before that, but, but you’ve had a number of these big books.

What are you working on at the moment?

Cathy Scott:

Working on the, uh, the, um, Anne Rule, , Queen of True Crime, , biography of Anne Rule. She was, um, uh, she did 33 books, I think, 34, and she wrote the Ted Bundy book, Serial Killer, The Stranger Beside Me, and, uh, when she was a New York Times bestseller. I learned a lot about her, which prompted me.

I got to know her three years before she died. She died in 2015. so I got to know her in I was just in Seattle with a film crew. Um, and, uh, that’s where she lived. And then, [00:38:00] uh,

Declan Hill:

And when is that book coming out next Christmas?

Cathy Scott:

That’ll be on next year. Cause I’m, I’ve been working on it for five years.

Cause it is extensive. And then I got sick in between. I’m fine now, but I took a break all year, but, um, And Murder of a Mafia Daughter about Susan Burnham being murdered by her best friend Robert Durst at Big Trial in L. A. I’ve done three editions of that book, too. And finally, they got him. And that took years, too.

That was the LAPD. And then, um, Biggie Smalls died six months after Tupac, and that became my second book. And so those are really my big three, uh, I did a book, Death in the Desert, about Ted Binion. He was a son of Binion’s horseshoe owner, and, um, his, it was called a murder, it wasn’t. I sat through that trial, he died from a drug overdose, self induced.

And that finally came out in the second trial. So I sat through two of those trials, no longer in Vegas. I’m in San Diego where I was born and raised. I live up in the mountains and but I can research and go anywhere to write books.

Declan Hill:

And Cathyscott. com. That’s your, that’s your website.

Cathy Scott:

You’ll find me on Facebook. You friend me, I’ll friend you back.

Declan Hill:

Awesome.

Cathy Scott:

Uh, yeah, any of those things. So thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

Declan Hill:

No, it’s a great, great honor before you go. The most popular, section of the podcast is where the boring professor gets off and the students get to ask questions. So Akin , you’ve done amazing research over the last few months.

You brought this story to me. You’ve read it. Both of these books and then you, you made sure that I read them. Um, do you have questions for Cathy?

Akin Akinwunmi:

Yes, I do. Uh, thank you very much, Cathy, for your time. I appreciate all the work you’ve done on the Tupac case and I found it really interesting. Well, for a question, my question, is, I mean, with all the lack of information at [00:40:00] the time and all the lack of witnesses and all the deaths and the record labels and the companies would you say that there was a larger, I would say, plot or conspiracy at the end of the day that involved maybe the record labels?

I know there’s a lot of talk out there about Bad Boy records and, and Death Row records. Uh, would you say that there, the, it would transcended more from gang on gang violence to something bigger?

Cathy Scott:

Well, I think that, I mean, it was, it was bad for business for them too, and I think with Suge Knight. You know, he, um, he wouldn’t help police at all, and it’s just kind of a street gang mentality when you’ve got guys who come from the street and end up running a record company. I mean, he ended up killing somebody and he’s in, prison for it.

He’s also, um, it’s come out that he was responsible and ordered, Uh, Tupac Shakur, or, um, Biggie Smalls [00:41:00] murder. So, you know, you do this to me we do this to you this does retaliation, but I think I think the gang mentality but I think with, I think with Sean Combs who he’s really transformed, because Sean Combs.

P. Diddy. used to be, um, well respected in the industry. Everybody said he wasn’t a thug like Suge Knight came from the streets, you know, and look at, look at now the guy had a sex ring allegedly and, and look at, you know, he’s never going to see daylight again. Outside of prison. And, so maybe they’re, you know, he was scared afterward.

A lot of rappers were scared afterward, especially when Tupac when Biggie was killed six months later. I think it’s sobered everybody up but they didn’t seem to officially want to sign, solve the crime either, and wanted it to go away, just as much, but I think it’s a little bit of the gang mentality from them too, but it’s like “Nunya” – You know, none of your business and they didn’t want the police, they didn’t want to be involved with the police.

So that’s why they didn’t want the crime solved. They already knew who did it anyway.

Akin Akinwunmi:

Okay. Thank you very much for your time. And thank you for answering the question.

Cathy Scott:

You’re welcome.

Declan Hill:

Cathy, thank you very much.

Really, really appreciate it.

Cathy Scott:

Thank you. Thanks so much.

**
Reading from Compton Street Legend by Duane ‘Keffe D’ Davis

The moral of the story – real gangsters nothing to be fucked with.
It’s Ruthless way of life. One that I’ve lived majority of my life. Some gangster rappers have glamorized and glorified their life – like it’s cool. It’s something to strive for. They have a lot of people’s minds twisted.
The truth of the matter is gang-banging, acting like a thug, ain’t no joke. For us Vegas was another day at the office. It may sound cold-hearted but from a street perspective the killings of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls would be considered nothing more than collateral damage.

**

Declan Hill:

It’s Declan here. Thank you for listening to this episode of CrimeWaves, the killing of Tupac. What do you have to do in Vegas to get arrested? It was produced by my brilliant students, Akin Akinwunmi and Angie Paulus. And the reading from Compton Street legend by Keefe D Davis was by Jamari Ellerbe-Cundiff.

So please, if you enjoyed this episode, do take some time to like subscribe, rate review, or just comment on the show. Um, because we’re the little guys trying to punch above our weight by doing super interesting ethical, independent, and nonpartisan true crime cases.

No spin, no nonsense. And we’re up against some pretty powerful corporate media podcasts with massive budgets who sometimes frankly lie to you, their listeners.

We don’t do that. So please help raise our profile. Thank you again for listening. And we’ll see you again for the next episode of CrimeWaves.

This is the end.

The proposed plan to sell off a section of FIFA to a group of investors led by Donald Trump’s son-in-law is the end of the credibility of Gianni Infantino’s FIFA.

How can we take such an organization seriously?

Remember the Folarin Balogun red card scandal where Donald Trump phoned up Gianni to get the one game suspension overturned. How does that decision seem to you, now you know there was a proposed ten-billion-dollars deal between the two men?

Remember that the father of this infamous group was criminally convicted of financial fraud and witness tampering. Donald Trump pardoned him and made him US Ambassador to France.

Not I am not joking. This is the family who will now hold a significant financial part of the world’s “Beautiful Game”.

How can we ever take such an organization seriously again?

**

It was a schooling.

A late-night discussion in the back of a Singaporean bar with the wonderful journalist Jeffrey Low. He said,

“You are obsessed with these match-fixers. Don’t you understand those people are the chicken-feed criminals. They fix a few games, pay off a few players, make some money on the betting market. Big deal. The real criminals. The ones with the fingers in every pie are above them: they are the politicians, the Ministers and Princes in Malaysia, the super-rich business guys here. They control everything. Forget your crusade against match-fixing and look at the real power in the world.”

He was right.

Dear Jeffrey died a few weeks ago, loved and surrounded by friends and family, but he would have laughed long and hard over this latest FIFA iniquity. One of the prevailing theories was that Asian-style match-fixing would never prevail in Europe or North America. The sports people would be too honest.

Jeffrey’s theory? Once the Americans figured out a way of match-fixing for profit they would normalize and make bags of cash.

He was proven right.

Funny, you should mention that….

The New York Times’ Jacob Whitehead has just come out with an excellent article about betting irregularities at the FIFA World Cup. It came out the very day that I was posting an article on the same subject.

The team at the University of New Haven including experts at the research team Jixy.gg - having been monitoring the World Cup for irregular betting patterns around the tournament.

I hate putting this kind of report so I dragged my heels to do it. I hate writing about irregular betting patterns because there are a thousand reasons why an odds market could go up and down. Many of those reasons are perfectly legal.

However, I finally got around to writing the report because on Tuesday I read that the FIFA Integrity Group had just proudly announced that “FIFA Integrity Task Force identifies no suspicious betting activity during FIFA World Cup 2026”

Ummmm…

I am not sure which World Cup they were monitoring but it certainly was not the same one that we were. Nor, was it the same World Cup that one of their constituent groups - The Council of Copenhagen - monitored. They came up with seven ‘yellow alerts’ and twelve potential corruption infractions in matches for irregular betting.

Our analysis was tighter. We only came up with three matches that we thought should be studied/investigated because of irregular betting. Again this is not to necessarily say that there was corruption in these games - just because the market moves dramatically does not mean that there was corruption.

Here then is my original article that I was just about to print when I saw the New York Times’ superb piece.

**

I loathe writing this article.

I do it for two reasons: one, it is true. Someone, somewhere made an awful lot of money during the World Cup with bets that moved the sports gambling market in a massive way. Bets measured in millions, if not tens-of-millions-of-dollars.

Two, no one else is doing it. After the ridiculous and credibility challenging bromance between the President of FIFA, Gianni Infantino, and Donald Trump, it is clear that there is no official body actually looking after the integrity of the World Cup.

There are various sports integrity companies that are paid to do this work by FIFA. There is an FBI department of that is supposed to guard sports against match-fixing. There are various companies who work with FIFA to ensure the integrity of the tournament. There is even a department inside FIFA charged with protecting the sport. But none of those august institutions will publicly say anything that will challenge the fifteen billion dollars in the profits that FIFA made from this tournament.

The sports integrity companies that, as the researchers of the University of New Haven do, monitor the betting odds. They are paid by FIFA. This is a walking, talking conflict of interest. There is a reason why meat inspectors are paid by the government not by the companies to protect our food supply. What normal, self-interested person is ever going to publicly announce that there are potential problems on the sports gambling market while being paid by the company (FIFA) that is running the same tournament?

It is the same for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, what sane, self-interested investigator in such a politically-directed organization as the FBI is now (its former Director James Comey is facing criminal charges for posting a photo of rocks on a beach that President Trump did not like) is going to investigate any potential match-fixing in a sports tournament that MUST go well for the President electoral reasons? And “must go well” means no corruption scandals.

It should not be left up to the Sports Integrity Center of the University of New Haven to point out that there were three games with odd odds movements at the World Cup… but it seems there is no one else will do it - so we have to.

The Analysis

“I have taken money for a few games. This [match-fixing] has been going on for years. The most recent case is from the last season. In this case it was just a normal league game. We had gone to the game as the underdog and so the loss did not surprise anybody…”
Finnish match-fixing player discussing the tactics of corrupting games.

Please reader, I trust you to understand what I write: odd movements are not necessarily indications of a fixed match. There are lots of reasons why odds move on the sports gambling market: injuries to key players, announcement of the team line-up, weather conditions, an eerie prediction on the Simpsons TV show, etc.

There are lots of honest players, referees and match officials that would never fix a game in a thousand years.

However, these odds shifts are worth noting simply because the volume of money bet on every World Cup game is massive. In the previous 32-team, 64-game format of the tournament each game would have approximately one billion dollars placed on it. For the big matches, semi-finals or finals- the amount would be in the billions. For this World Cup, the legal market shattered all the previous records in the total amount gambled and that is just the amounts that we can see. There are still massive amounts of money bet with the offshore bookmakers that does not show up on the estimates.

This is the first time since 2014, that there was an odd movement so large that it could shift the market during a World Cup tournament. In most games, the liquidity on the games simply any attempt to analyze it.

These are matches that should be investigated. Again, this does not mean that they were fixed matches just that there are odd odd movements.

All of the games follow the usual pattern.

They were in the opening round of games. Either second or third games.
They were lopped-side victories where the team that the market expected to win did so but by more than the spread of the gambling market. This means that their victories were actually counted as victories by the bookmakers. You can see in the quote above from the player in the Finnish soccer league this is how match-fixing works: bribe the weaker team to give you certainty.

Then a player said, “The first [goal] must come immediately. Even be­fore the people take their seats. That way it is not noticed so much. And then two more, as they develop, but all in the first half.”
“And in the second?”
A player laughed. “In the second we all lie down and take a nap.”

There were goals in the first fifteen minutes which is a favourite trick of corrupted players, as the excerpt from the masterful The Miracle of Castel di Sangre shows.
There were red cards.
There were own goals.
There were sudden odds movements.
There were matches that followed the pattern of the market but were above the spread. Thereby making it easier, if a fixer was involved, in potentially fixing the game.

The three games are Senegal vs. Iraq, Portugal vs. Uzbekistan and Qatar vs. Canada.

I emphasize very, very clearly - there are lots of honest, decent people - players, referees, officials - who are not corrupt. The odds movements - both before and during these games - may be completely innocent.

But these matches should be investigated just in case there was something wrong.

Sadly, there is no one seemingly, inside FIFA, who will do a proper investigation.

Sigh.

A reasonable person, not a conspiracy theorist, could look at half-a-dozen of the games in this World Cup tournament and have genuine doubts about the integrity of the sport.

Say what you like about Sepp Blatter’s version of FIFA (and I said much), at least the corruption, mostly, stopped at the pitch. There was ticket scalping (now organized by FIFA and made legal for their maximum profits), host country bribes, TV broadcasting rights pay-offs and hotel room scams but the actual on-field corruption was caused by gangster match-fixers. At this tournament, it is FIFA itself that seems to be running the match-fixing.

Welcome to Gianni Infantino’s FIFA.

How to Get a Referee to Fix a Game

Tim Donaghy, the gambling addicted, ex-National Basketball Association (NBA) referee who worked with organized crime connected bookies while he was refereeing, is a close contact. His essential, paraphrased, claim is, “Yes, I was gambling while an NBA referee but the league was even more corrupt. The league wants profit for as many people as possible. They want eyeballs on their sport. Their dream final is New York versus Los Angeles in a seven-game series. Leagues don’t tell the referees explicitly to fix a game so that the larger market team wins. They call ‘special training’ sessions the morning of the big game of the series and announce that they are worried about a particular type of play that is benefiting the small market team. All the referees get the message. You want to rise in the organization and get to officiate the big games, you deliver the results the league wants.”

It is the same for Gianni Infantino’s FIFA. Their nightmare is a World Cup final featuring small market teams with few bankable stars - a game like Croatia versus Egypt. Sure you would get sympathetic fans for cultural reasons - but really that is a fraction of the money to be made if a Cristian Ronaldo or Lionel Messi led team is in the final.

You do not get to be a high-level referee in any sports league by delivering results the bosses don’t like.

In 2018, the inspirational Ghanian journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas, taped one of the referees who was to officiate at that year’s World Cup tournament. The referee was ready to sell a game for $500. Repeat. One of the top referees in the world was ready to sell a game for a few hundred dollars. This is the level of professional competency in the FIFA refereeing world.

“The standards of refereeing at the tournaments are “not good enough. He [the referee] can send any team out in any moment. Its just not good enough… We give everything and then decisions are overturned in a very questionable way.”

Those are not my words but Thomas Tuchel, the German coach of the English national team. He, along with many other football experts, have spoken about the “erratic” standard of officiating.

The Secret of Match-Officiating

Tim Donaghy spoke about the league’s most popular referees (ie: referees who were popular with the league not the fans). They would never allow one team to dominate or run up the score but try to level the court by calling ‘discretionary fouls’.

There is an enormous area of discretion in officiating a game. The purists claim that it is the rule of the automaton who call a game exactly and logically. Nonsense. In any game there are a range of calls that can be called or ignored.

Iran’s goal against Egypt in the final minutes of the game - that would have sent them through to the next round - looked in that discretionary area of refereeing: an offside of a body part rather than the whole person. But the call certainly benefited FIFA for it got rid of the controversial Iranian team.

It is the same for Egypt’s disallowed goal against Argentina. It was almost exactly mirrored by a similar foul that was waved off for the Lionel Messi-led Argentines. The Egyptian National Football Association has launched a major FIFA legal appeal, explicitly claiming that, “The Egyptian Football Association cannot remain silent regarding the refereeing decisions witnessed during the match against Argentina as well as the failure to make appropriate use of the Video Assistant Referee [VAR] system.”

The Sport-Dooming Bromance

Throw in the political agenda of Gianni Infantino’s bromance partner US President Donald Trump and you have a massive credibility problem at this year’s World Cup. There was a team in the World Cup - Iran - that the American hosts, did not want in their country. The American government defied thousands of years of Olympic peace traditions and denounced the Iranians every chance they could get. They made them fly in/out of the country immediately before and after games. Markwayne Mullin, the head of Homeland Security, announced that he did the ‘happy dance’ when Iran was sent home.

To add fuel to the alleged corruption fire, this week, Donald Trump announced that he had personally called Gianni Infantino to overturn a match ban on an American star player. Perhaps more ominously, Trump’s Secretary of Commerce, the Jeffrey Epstein-linked Howard Lutnick had three meetings on Infantino on the same subject. Lutnick was accompanied, according to Politico that broke this story, with high-priced lawyers who spoke about lawsuits against FIFA if they did not change their rules to benefit the host nation. Gianni Infantino’s FIFA crumbled and changed the rules.

The soccer world was furious. The quote that best sums up their wide-ranging fury is from Javier Tebas, President of one of the world’s biggest soccer leagues, Spain’s La Liga, said, “[It] is neither a mere anecdote or an isolated mistake. It is, quite simply, the tip of the iceberg of a governance model that has been undermining the credibility of FIFA and football in general for many years.”

Cue every match and odd refereeing decision in the tournament to be re-examined.

Gianni Infantino’s nightmare has begun.

#FIFA #FIFAWorldcup #Matchfixing

As always, if you liked this post, please, subscribe, comment or like. All good wishes, Declan

The Jeffrey Epstein prison death as seen by the New York Times.

It was a hit job.

A well-executed, professional media execution. The entire investigation by the New York Times of Jeffrey Epstein’s death in prison promised so much but delivered so little.

Why would the Times print such a hatchet job?
Well, they wouldn’t they…

This is a media outlet that has spent the last six years rubbishing any skepticism about the verdict of suicide. They claim that anyone who had doubts that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself must be a “conspiracy theorist”.
Under those circumstances it would take NY Times journalists with exceptional valour to be able to conduct an investigation that proved their colleagues wrong.

You see similar issues in Cold Case investigations by the same police unit. The “Who are you, smart ass, to come in and show the world I was wrong?” factor that demonstrates the need for an independent team of investigators to overturn wrongful convictions or discover solutions to unsolved murders.

The second issue is more cultural. The Sulzberger Family, who own the New York Times, are rich, upper-class, white Jewish establishment of New York. These were Epstein’s people. Note - unlike other independent journalists I am not claiming that the Sulzbergers were connected to Jeffrey Epstein. What I am saying is that there is a social class issue. It is like asking upper-class English journalists at The Times or Telegraph to investigate fraud among the hat-wearing Ascot set or allegations of abuse at private schools like Harrow or Eton. It is all just so embarrassing when members of the same social class expose each others’ failings. So they tend not to do it.

I write the above not because I necessarily believe Jeffrey Epstein’s death to be murder. I am an investigator: my only desire is to see, finally, a proper investigation into what actually happened to America’s most famous prisoner inside that Manhattan jail but the New York Times’ investigation is very far from a proper investigation.

The paper had, purportedly, assigned four journalists and a team of visual editors to work full-time gathering new material on Epstein’s death. Lets begin by looking at some of the good parts of their investigation before showing their lack-of-follow-through and bizarre failings. But first a clip from the great Mob movie - The Godfather - on the criminal view of ‘hangings in prison’.

The Godfather warning that he doesn’t want any unlucky accidents like his son hanging himself in prison or being hit by a bolt of lightening

The Good That They Do...

The Epstein papers released in late January 2026 had the names of many of the prisoners in Epstein’s jail unit. The Times journalists spoke to some of them. This included one person who, allegedly, talked to Jeffrey Epstein the night of his death. He was in the cell next to Epstein and claimed that he heard someone tearing sheets in the middle of the night. He called out to them and Epstein replied.

Okay…

This is very important. There are a series of questions that are not spelt out like - why didn’t the FBI or any other government investigator interview this inmate and write up his story in the government reports? How did the inmate know that it was Epstein who replied to him? However, let’s put all those questions, which are not answered in the article, aside and concentrate on the major piece of pro-self-harm evidence that The Times journalists worked very hard to obtain: Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide note.

What?!

The Alleged Suicide Note

Yes, if you have not heard this piece of news - it is a big one. Allegedly, Jeffrey Epstein wrote the following note:

“ONLY PAIN To ME & Others in the future. NOT very much fun! Why should people I Lov suffer for my problem. So… Whatcha want me to do? Burst out cryin!!!! Best for all.”

It was discovered by his cellmate, the eventually quadruple convicted murderer Nicholas Tartaglione, tucked into a graphic comic book in their cell. He purportedly kept it for years as evidence to show that he had saved Jeffrey Epstein’s life the night of July 23, 2019 when there was an odd incident at approximately 1:23 a.m. with Epstein being discovered with a plastic tie around his neck.

I could write an entire podcast about this note, but in the end, I think it means very little. Here is why:

1. The provenance is bad. We simply do not know when the note was written or what it was meant to be. We have only Tartaglione’s word that that the note was connected with Epstein. After all, the usual suicide note, if there is one, is not stuck in the leaves of a book, let alone a graphic comic book. This does not mean that the note is not genuine, it just does not show what it is purported to be - a final testament to the world. It could, just as easily, be some random scribblings when Epstein was at a low mental point.

2. Nicholas Tartaglione had every motive to use the note to show that he had not attacked Epstein, as Jeffrey Epstein claimed. Tartaglione is facing a potential death sentence. Anything that can show he is a good guy who stopped a potential suicide will help him in front of a judge.

3. Despite the best spinning efforts of the New York Times and Nicholas Tartaglione, the above note was not necessarily written on the night of July 22/23. The actual note that Epstein did write that night contained references to Emil Zola, the French Jewish army officer who endured years of prison to defend his innocence. It begins “J’accuse…” and ends, “Me/too Jewish-Rich-Politics. Believe the victim = Believe the accuser - CRAZY.” You may not agree with the sentiments but it is not necessarily a sign of self-harm.

   Spoiler Alert: The End of the First Season of the Wire - how jail ‘suicides’ often happen in real life

The Bad - What The Times Mentioned but Never Followed Up

“The Guards Killed Epstein”

“As they (FBI investigators) toured the SHU, an inmate named Jeffrey Estevez told us, “everybody was screaming, saying: ‘Y’all murdered him! Y’all murdered Epstein!”

There is a specific mention of inmates screaming as the FBI entered the prison unit that the guards had killed Epstein. The Times mentions this story and then never returns to it.

This is unfathomable.

Imagine if the FBI were conducting a Wolf of Wall Street type investigation into some high-level commercial fraud. When they arrive to serve the warrant at the plush offices on Wall Street: the executives come out of their offices and start screaming, “It was our CEO who did the crime. The CEO!” Do you think the FBI would ignore those allegations? Do you think the New York Times journalists would mention an incident like that and then do the journalistic equivalent of a shrugging of their shoulders?

This is class-based media bias. The New York Times simply does not count poor people as having the same weight as rich people. Those prisoners in the MCC were mostly poor, working class people. Some of their were hoodlums, but few of them were rich, so The Times just ignores what they have to say. The journalists seem never, at least from what is written in their article, to have asked any of the inmates they interviewed what did the prisoners mean when they shouted “Y’all murdered him…”

“The Most Unusual Hanging Ever…”

“Michael Freeman, the editor in chief of the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine. Freeman, a professor of forensic medicine, has submitted a report to a scientific journal in which he argues that several details in the photograph - … - point decisively to homicide. If Epstein’s death was a suicide, Freeman said, “it would be the most unusual hanging ever.”

With such a botched official investigation - destroyed evidence, no cameras, a disturbed crime scene - the examination of Epstein’s body became hugely important. Only two medical examiners actually looked at his corpse. The government-appointed one who said the evidence was inconclusive and then, a few days later, their boss stepped in and declared the death a suicide. The second medical examiner, hired by Mark Epstein, declared the wounds to be indicative of homicide.

Since then there has been a battle of two-handed forensics “experts” (two-handed from the joke, that no expert who is called into a case, can ever stop saying, “On the other hand…” Editor: Its not that funny, Declan. Get back to the investigation!) all claiming that it was probably suicide based on their understanding of the prison environment or, occasionally, forensic experts who consider that the wounds on Epstein were conclusive evidence of murder. In the New York Times article, they mention the above expert and, again, never return to analyze his statement. Let alone, pick up the material that we have covered in CrimeWaves of wounds on Epstein’s body that were never mentioned in the official report.

The Changing Stories of the Lawyers

Epsteins’ lawyers are portrayed in the New York Times article as largely keeping him company and making sure he did not commit suicide. I am not saying that is not true; but I am saying that marks a huge change from their attitude in August 2019. A week after Epstein was found dead in his cell, his senior lawyer Reid Weingarten pleaded with the judge in the criminal trial to launch an official investigation into Epstein’s death..

David Schoen, another of Jeffrey Epstein’s lawyers is portrayed as indicating that his death may have been suicide. That would be an 180 degree change! On his interview with us at CrimeWaves, Schoen was adamant that he thought the death was probably murder,

One Word to Damn Them All

The most extraordinary exclusion by the Times journalists is their painstaking and almost useless investigation of Epstein’s days under suicide watch.

To review, on the night of July 22/23, 2019 - Epstein was found unresponsive in his cell with a plastic tie around his neck. He, at first, claimed that he had been attacked by his cellmate, Nicholas Tartaglione (see above). Then he changed his story claiming that he “could not remember what happened…”. The context of this change may have been his writing that Tartaglione telling him that if Epstein told the guards that he attacked him, the guards would do nothing.

Epstein then spends several days in the prison’s suicide watch unit. The conditions on this unit are unbelievably harsh. Prisoners sleep on the floor. They are observed 24-hours a day through a plexiglass wall. However, as he is exiting the suicide watch unit, Epstein begs to stay. Why? “Because’ he replies, “He wants to be safe.”

Safe.

That one word dams the entire Times investigation for it contains a whole host of questions their investigation team does not seem to have asked:

“Safe” from what?
“Safe” from whom?
“Safe” from a particular person?
“Safe” from Nicholas Tartaglione, the man who would be convicted of killing people with a plastic tie around their necks (the same thing found on Epstein)?
“Safe” from another inmate?
“Safe” from a potential murder plot?
If he had been kept “safe” in the suicide watch would Jeffrey Epstein he still be alive today?

Unbelievably, the Times team seem to have not considered any of these questions and hurried on to the next section of their “investigation”. I understand that all media people have word counts and space limitations but some of the material that the NY Times left out is extraordinary.

The Unmentioned

The first and most extraordinary omission from The Times investigation is that there is no mention of the prison paperwork that showed there was an extra person on Epstein’s unit the night he died.

What?!

Yes, there is no mention that the official prison record shows that there was an extra person on Epstein’s jail wing from 10:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. the night he died. You would think that such a record would require at least some mention. The Department of Justice investigators spend pages twisting themselves into knots to explain this factor but the NY Times journalists never even mention it.

The Torture Center

The Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) where Epstein was housed is presented in the NY Times article as an under-staffed, “dysfunctional” place. It was not. The MCC was an utterly corrupt, torture center. A deliberately maintained hellhole designed to break the inmates.

There were serial sexual abusers, rapists, organized crime-linked drug traffickers, and murderers at the prison - and those were just the guards. The inmates, if they had money, could obtain just about anything they wanted. One expert told the New York Post “there were more phones in the MCC then Best Buy”. A prisoner staged a rap concert from the high-security wing. Another prisoner had a gun. A few days before Epstein’s death, the guards released the wrong prisoner and sent him home with a bus pass.

The level of corruption inside the MCC was extraordinary. At one point, the guards who were aligned with the organized crime mobsters, wrote them letters of reference for their sentence hearing.

The two senior drug traffickers that we spoke to on CrimeWaves both said of all the jails that they were in (and they were in a lot) the MCC was by far the worst.

The prison guards around Epstein were so odd that one of them was receiving tens-of-thousands of dollars in unmarked cash. These deposits were so suspicious that her bank red-flagged them to the FBI investigators. They seemingly never asked her about them.

On Epstein’s final night, he got his guards to give him the unit phone for twenty-two minutes alone in the shower. How does that happen without major corruption?

In short, if you were going to have a murder in a prison, the MCC is the prison that you would choose to do it in.

There is a host of other major factors that The NY Times investigators passes over: the non-functioning camera system, the fact that any video recordings that do exist in the public realm are copies not the original recordings, the fact that millions of pages of the Epstein File, presumably the most interesting, have still not been released by the Trump Department of Justice. But most seriously of all The New York Times glosses over the one glaring fact that has emerged from the Epstein papers in the last few months: Jeffrey Epstein was prepared to name names to get himself out of prison.

The Motive for the Killing

This is huge as it gives a lot of powerful people very powerful motives for having Epstein killed.

At that time, the summer of 2019, some of the unknown secrets of Epstein’s class included the sexual trafficking of underage girls with France’s top model agency - whose CEO was arrested after Jeffrey Epstein and whose body was also found dead in prison - to Bill Gates having a sexually transmitted disease to Noam Chomsky phoning Epstein from the President of Brazil’s jail cell to Howard Lutnick, currently Trump’s Secretary of Commerce visiting Epstein’s island, years after Epstein’s conviction for sexual trafficking and discussing his nannies. The list of powerful people who have lost their jobs due to the proximity to Epstein goes from Hollywood super-agents to movie producers to members of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee to Presidents of international banks to the British Ambassador to Washington to Prince Andrew.

I am not claiming that anyone of those specific people arranged for Jeffrey Epstein’s murder but I am saying that was an extraordinary number of powerful, rich people with an interest in having Epstein silenced permanently.

It is a Conspiracy Theory

Much of the Times inadequate investigation is spent dismissing “conspiracy theorists”. The implication is that only true journalists like the New York Times team can sort out the ‘truth’. The public must be protected from themselves. We are all too gullible and easily led by “misinformation” and Internet tales. This arrogant, nose-stuck-in-the-air attitude disregards the value of a disinterested public helping to solve mysteries that have baffled ‘experts’. The public has a long, noble tradition of solving intractable problems from the first edition of the Oxford English dictionary to the Netflix series ‘Don’t F*** with Cats”.

Specifically in the Jeffrey Epsten case, it was “Internet conspiracy theorists” who discovered that the photo of the cloth noose that Epstein had purportedly used to hang himself was the wrong noose. The same theorists saw another cloth that could have been better for this task - but the FBI had destroyed it in their official investigation.

Here is the truth the New York Times journalists have not understood. There is a conspiracy theory around the Epstein Case. It depends on half-truths and wild, seemingly impossible tales and improbable connections. It is the official story of his death.

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The match-fixers are already buzzing around the tournament and teams. The arrangements and initial payments made.

For those of you who didn’t get a chance to read it - I wrote a three-part series on match-fixers at the World Cup. The Daily Telegraph was kind enough to ask me to write a summation of the work.

Since then we have discovered - thanks to the excellent work of The Athletic that two players who have been arrested for match-fixing in the last month are playing in the tournament. This is along with the fact that the referee for the US vs. Australia match was banned for fixing games with the Sapina Gang. You really would think that FIFA could find a more suitable official.

Now, the situation will get worse.

It is the time of the third games in the opening round. The dead rubber matches - where one team needs to win: and where it does not matter for the other team. Throw in that some teams will not pay their players or pay them badly and the fixes will happen.

This situation is compounded because it actually may benefit some teams to lose games, certain as they are of their qualification. The Wall Street Journal points out the fear of Algeria and Austria fighting to lose to avoid playing Spain in the next round.

I do not know if this will happen but I do know that this issue is really easy to solve. All it takes is better tournament organization. The brainy nerds at the French University of St. Malo who specialize in the mathematical organization of tournaments (as do a number of my contacts - who support this view) say that FIFA’s organization of the World Cup - they call it, “the worst format possible” seems to have been driven by money-making rather than protecting sporting integrity.

It may be so, what is certain is that the tournament is not well-structured and the match-fixers will take advantage of it. They were at last World Cup in Qatar, they have been at almost all the FIFA tournaments since 1991. They will continue because no one in sports seems willing to fight them.

It was - theoretically - the second most important game at the tournament: The 3rd place match on July 16,1994. The game was between Sweden and Bulgaria. It was a historic occasion. Neither team had ever or would ever climb so high in world football rankings. In both countries, even now, there is nostalgia for the golden tournament of these glory teams.

The match-fixers were there.

The night before the game, Uncle Frankie, an Indonesian-Chinese match-fixer who transformed the world of sports corruption by getting on planes and doing internationally what was common practice in Asian tournaments - fixing them.

He met some of the Swedish players at their hotel. Uncle Frankie invited them back to his room. They saw an enormous pile of cash lying on the bed. Uncle Frankie offered it to them, if they would give him the result that he wanted. They immediately declined and left the room. They won the game 4-0 but to this day, a couple of the Swedish players wonder if Uncle Frankie had repeated his offer more successfully to some of the Bulgarian players.

Will the match-fixers be back at this World Cup tournament?

Why not? They have been at almost every other major FIFA tournament since then.

In the first part of this series we examined the tournament secrets that help motivate corruption: the tournaments are designed to have dead rubber matches - games where it really matters to one team if they win or not; a lot of the players, coaches, managers and officials are gambling addicts: and a lot of the players are under-paid. To make it even worse, at this World Cup the players’ salaries will be taxed by US authorities.

In the second part of the series, we got inside the match-fixing world and I showed you that the match-fixers are both smart and very well-connected.

In this third part, lets examine why no one inside the FIFA world is doing anything effective to stop the fixers.

SECRET 6: The Con of the Sports Integrity Industry

“You know match-fixing is a problem, but I have been thinking, our bigger problem is marketing. If the fans knew how extensive corruption is in our sport they would switch off.”
Very Senior European football official, Interview with Hill (Just before he threatened me with his mob buddies - but that’s a story for another day).

Here is another secret: the much vaunted system of integrity used by FIFA to protect against match-fixing during a World Cup is useless. Not only is it useless, almost everyone knows that it is useless but publicly pretends otherwise.

This is what FIFA does. They form a relationship with a sports betting monitoring company. For years, they essentially outsourced their integrity units to Sportradar (see articles here by stock short sellers on the alleged links between this company and organized crime). The claim is that these companies can monitor the gambling market during the World Cup and see if there was anything suspicious going on during games.

Ummmm… they cannot do it.

I mean they say they can do it but they really cannot do it effectively.

You cannot tell what is going on in the sports gambling market at the World Cup - it is too large.

The average game in the World Cup takes in over one-billion-dollars in bets. It is by far the biggest sports gambling tournament in the world. During the 2014 World Cup, I stayed up through the night at the Hong Kong Jockey Club as a match took place at the World Cup in Brazil. I will respect commercial secrets but I can tell you the amount gambled on just that one site in just Hong Kong - population 7.4 million - was in the tens-of-millions of dollars on just the live action of the game. There are tens-of-thousands of other Asian gambling sites, some of them far larger than the Jockey Club.

In other words, the kind of monitoring that FIFA boasts about can work if you are overseeing a small league - where a shift of a few million dollars can be seen almost immediately.

It can even work on a small bet in a big game. This is what happened to the NBA player Jontay Porter and his gang of inexperienced gambling fixers. They bet hundreds-of-thousands of dollars on a series of relatively small ‘micro’ bets linked to Porter’s performance.

But at the World Cup? Naawww, you are just not going to see that much of a movement. After all, the match-fixer bets are with the team that the market expects to win anyway.

There is another problem in those very rare occasions that the market can spot a suspicious odds movements.

Betting Movements are Not Evidence

During the 2014 World Cup, I was touring the sites and sights of the illegal Asian match-fixing and gambling world for the New York Times. In one of the third games of the opening round (the usual fixers’ target) - Croatia played Cameroon. Someone, somewhere in about the tenth minute of the game moved the opening line by half-a-goal. That is a huge bet. Possibly more than $30 million dollars all on Cameroon to lose above the Asian Handicap.

The actual game was bizarre. Players on the Cameroonian team fought with each other. Their former star player - Samuel Eto’o - had arrived at the tournament with Rolex watches as gifts that he claimed would inspire the players to their honest best. Wilson Raj Perumal, the Asian match-fixer, claimed to a German journalist that the game was fixed (he later rescinded his claim).

Here is the problem - its not evidence.

There has only been one case where the Council of Arbitration of Sport (CAS - the Supreme Court for international sports) has accepted betting data as legal evidence. So Sportradar announced in their formal press briefing that “there was no evidence” that there was any match-fixing at the tournament. Its true, no matter what the market would have done - there would have been no legal evidence of match-fixing.

Why Doesn’t FIFA Do Something?

Because FIFA is a living, walking-talking model of a conflict of interest. This is an unspoken protection deal at the very heart of its structure.

The President of FIFA - Gianni Infantino is elected by presidents of National Football Associations (NFAs) from each member country in the organization. Many of those NFA Presidents are deeply corrupt. The Presidents vote for a FIFA leader who will keep the cash rolling in. The FIFA leader ensures that the Presidents of the National Football Associations can do pretty anything they want in their own country. “Pretty anything they want” in the last few years has extended very far in the footballing world. In Argentina, the country that won the last World Cup, the head of the National Football Association and many of his top officials have been indicted in a massive money laundering and commercial fraud case. Same thing in the Republic of Congo. There the former leader of football has been convicted of widespread financial crimes. A little further North in the Central African Republic, their senior football leader is now in prison for widespread war crimes. Or, according to the New York Times, the former head of Conmebol (the Latin American chapter of FIFA) who is accused of taking millions of dollars in secret payments from a ‘victims fund’ established by the US Department of Justice.

In none of those cases, did FIFA move quickly to investigate the alleged wrong doing.

It will be the same for a potential match-fixing scandal at the World Cup. This is not an organization that wants to embarrass any of its officials.

There is another force that is supposed to be stopping potential match-fixing at these tournaments - American police and law enforcement. They, too, will not do anything.

SECRET 7: No one is stopping them: Politics and the Police

There is an FBI Unit dedicated to stopping cases of sports integrity and match-fixing. It is supposed to be working hard to monitor the upcoming World Cup and investigating match-fixers.

It will not succeed.

The FBI will not succeed, partly, because in their fight to protect soccer they have been mostly trained by people in the international sports integrity industry. The same industry that is riven with commercial and political conflicts of interest. You can see senior FBI officials at various FIFA press conferences and media events. They look po-faced and serious while declaiming about how “they will turn over every stone”, “push back against all corruption”, and etc etc (That’s enough anti-corruption cliches! Editor)

They will also not succeed because if they did it would be career suicide for any intelligent FBI investigator.

American politics are on a knife-edge. President Donald Trump is involved in a deeply unpopular war with Iran. His standing in political polls is sliding faster than a wet tray on a ski hill. The mid-term elections are coming up in November, a few months after the tournament. At this moment, the Democrats are predicted to retake both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Meaning Trump could face two years of impeachment trials from his political opponents. He needs a successful World Cup tournament. Trump needs lots of sports fans dancing before the cameras. He needs lots of slavish articles about how wonderful the United States actually is, how friendly the people, how over-stated the criticism against Trump.

What Trump does not need is a major sporting scandal featuring corruption at the World Cup - a major hope for his political comeback.

Given these circumstances, why would any intelligent FBI agent report a potential match-fixing case and pee on the political parade of the incumbent President? I am not sure what the level of federal crime is in northern Alaska, where winter temperatures fall to -30, but I am pretty sure that any FBI agents who revealed a major sporting scandal during this year’s World Cup would be bound for a one-way trip there.

Look, this is an organization who cannot investigate the White House, when someone, somewhere in that building made a successful bid on the prediction markets on the price of oil just minutes before President Trump announced yet another false tale of peace talks with Iran. The unknown person made a vast sum of money on inside information. America being America today, no federal investigation was launched.

I hope I am wrong. I hope that I have to eat my words. Its a sad fall for American federal agents. Ten years ago, they were at the heart of the international law enforcement case against corrupt FIFA officials. Some of the FIFA officials were dragged out of the six-star hotel in Zurich and put on flights to American prisons. Those days and agents are long-gone. Recently, the Trump Department of Justice (who are nominally in charge of the FBI) announced that they were closing down the investigation and releasing the remaining former FIFA officials.

There is a further reason why there will be no inquiry into possible corruption at the FIFA World Cup. The very intimate relations between President Donald Trump and Gianni Infantino.

The Infantino-Trump Bromance

Its difficult to overstate the nauseating level of obsequiousness produced by Gianni Infantino for Trump. Last year, at a US business conference Infantino said, “I think we should all support what he’s doing, because I think he’s doing pretty good, right?”

A few weeks later, Infantino “awarded” Trump the FIFA Peace Prize. It was claimed to be the inaugural prize - there have been no one recipients. Nor is it clear, why Trump, who has launched several bombing campaigns against Iran with no declaration of hostilities actually did to merit a “peace prize”.

Infantino was in attendance at the Gaza Board of Peace launch, no Palestinians from Gaza were there. He claimed that there would be a new seventy-five-million dollar project for the people of Gaza. None of that money has appeared yet.

I could go on but you get the idea. A match-fixing scandal will make Infantino’s ‘product’ - the World Cup - look bad. If Infantino looks bad, then Trump will look bad. Thus no US federal agent who values his career will wish to raise any suspicions of match-fixing.

I do genuinely hope I am wrong. There are many good people in the FBI and US law enforcement. But as things stand now, the United States will be an open field for match-fixing at this year’s World Cup. Sadly, the situation in Mexico and Canada is even worse.

Bonus SECRET: Canada and Mexico are open for match-fixing

It is difficult to report match-fixers when you are dead.

I said, “Look, if you, any of you get a problem, then you need to immediately report it to the Head of Referee’s Committee. This (American) referee put his hand up.
“That’d be difficult to do when we’re dead.”
“What do you mean?
“It’s a real privilege to be here for the World Cup, but every time I’ve been down here, I’ve been told that I must do this, or I must do that. I can’t tell you who told me that, but let’s just say that they were very close to the match… I’ve come down here three times. I’ve been warned three times and told that, ‘If I didn’t comply with the instructions that I was given, then I will be dead.’ So in this instance (if a match-fixer approached him), I’m just saying to you, who would I report it to?”

Interview with senior FIFA Official on training referees and match officials in Mexico

The American government will not let into the country various Iranian coaches and officials. They have detained a top striker from the Iraq team. They have refused entry to a FIFA referee from Somalia.

But the assistant coach of the Mexican national team was designated a major operator for the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. His name was removed after four years on the US government’s Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation list.

It is the kind of head-scratching bizarrity that could only happen in Mexico where the drug cartels and various levels of government are deeply intermingled.
The situation, strangely enough, is worse in Canada. Canadian soccer has a long, ignoble history of match-fixing. In 1986, the first time the men’s national team got to the World Cup, they celebrated by taking a tour of Singapore. Five members of the team took bribes to lose a match against North Korea. Their coach - the great Bob Bearpark, reportedly died devastated by this dishonour. The program took decades to recover.
The Canadian Soccer League of the 2000s and 2010s was a bastion of match-fixing. Even illegal bookmakers, not renowned for their honest attitude to sports, would refuse to take bets on the games. At international anti-match-fixing conferences, the Canadian Soccer League was denounced as a corrupt joke.
Here is the kicker. After all these scandals. After being awarded the host of the world’s biggest sporting tournaments. After four. years of legalized sports gambling - it is still legal to fix matches in Canada.
Forget all the other countries and issues. If you are a match-fixer, just station yourself in Canada. In my home and native country, there will be no knock on the door, no boot coming through the door or arrest. Because what you will be doing as a match-fixer is all completely legal.
There is a whole system designed, established and maintained to investigate but not publicize any suspicious events at a FIFA World Cup - thus the corruption will go on.
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FIFA is a legally-defined criminal organization, yet Canadian taxpayers have to cover all the loses while FIFA keeps all the profits - why? And why can’t we know how much the whole thing will cost? Democracy, anyone?

On my beloved CBC Television this weekend to discuss the FIFA World Cup in Canada.

It was a strange interview - it should have been done years ago, not a few days before the start of the tournament.

But for the record, here are my thoughts:

I love soccer and the World Cup. Few others have risked their lives to protect its integrity, so its difficult to find someone who appreciates the sport more.

However, why does FIFA - an organization that the Southern District of New York Court declared was a criminal organization - get to keep all the profits of the tournament, why taxpayers have to cover all the expenses?

Why don’t we know how much those expenses are? The various layers of Canadian politicians react to accountability and democracy like most people do when asked to lick a fire hydrant - they recoil and run away. There are all kinds of secret deals and expenses connected to the tournament and we - the taxpayers - have no idea how much it will cost us. The estimates keep going up. Last week, the Federal Budget Office declared the cost would be $82 million dollars for each of the ten games. So approximately $820 million dollars to host 10 soccer games.

Okay....

Except the estimate the week before was lower and the estimate before that was lower and the estimate when the bid was put together was really much lower.

Here is my guarantee - please hold me to it - The actual cost of the Canadian section will be far, far higher than $820 million. This is a boondoggle on a massive scale. The final bill will be quietly released (if ever) months/years after the event has wrapped up.

The Mafia Games

There is a precedent for all this secrecy, lack of democracy and potential corruption in Canada - the Montreal Olympic Games of 1976. The construction of the event was mostly in the hands of the Montreal Mafia - Frank and Vic Cotroni’s Mob. They were the Canadian chapter of the Bonanno Crime Family of New York and they made out like the proverbial bandits. The Oxford Olympics Study estimated cost overruns at 720%. It took Canadian taxpayers until 2006 - thirty years after the event! - to pay off the bill.

_{They call it ‘The Big Owe’ – the Montreal Olympic Stadium, the biggest of the white elephants}

Being the mob - the construction material and cement was shoddy. The stadium can barely function today and massive chunks of cement keep falling off it.

You would think with an iconic symbol of corruption and crime linked to a sport event Canadian politicians would be wary .... but no, this is Canada and they are Canadian politicians. The party will start, the politicians will enjoy it, the taxpayers will pay.

More at: www.declanhill.com/blogs

https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/9.7226257

Words don’t stop bullets.

Bits of paper don’t stop gangsters from killing people.

What Canadian cricket is facing is not a “sports crime”. It is not doping or cheating but an alleged, systemic campaign of criminal extortion committed by violent thugs.

In April of this year, the journalists at my former Canadian television program the fifth estate (akin to 60 Minutes or Panorama in the UK) presented an excellent and terrifying documentary on the conditions of the sport in Canada. It made for shocking viewing: national team players in disguise talking about death threats, their houses being sprayed with bullets and, of course, match-fixing.

The match-fixing occurred, allegedly, at the World Cup of T-20 Cricket. To North Americans this sports event is up-there with the International Grand Prix of Tiddlywinks or the Croquet Play-Offs. However, to sports fans in South Asia, Australia and other parts of the world this is HUGE. Cricket is the world’s second-most watched sports. The games are followed by hundreds-of-millions of people. Most of India and Pakistan stops when their national teams play matches.

Players on the Canadian national team, purportedly placed there by corrupt officials at the behest of mobsters fixed part of the game against New Zealand, while the gangsters made millions of dollars.

The criminal mobsters who are alleged to be at the heart of the scandal are some of the most violent in the world: the Lawrence Bishnoi gang run from a prison in Northern India were linked by police to the murder of Canadian singer Sidhu Moose Wala.

To readers who regard cricket as the purvey of white-clad gentlemen who invented a sport by removing all the exciting bits out of baseball, changing the shape of the bat, and extending the sport for five days, times have moved on. For decades now, illegal gangsters have been fixing matches and corrupting international. There was the strange and still unexplained death of an English coach after a bizarre loss in another World Cup tournament. There has been corruption involving some of the top star players like Hansie Cronje.

What makes this particular scandal so unique is that the dysfunction brought out by alleged violent gangsters goes far across the sport in Canada. It is a check to any Canadian parent letting their children play the sport.

Yesterday, the International Cricket Council (akin to FIFA for cricket) suspended the organization that runs cricket in Canada. They claim that Cricket Canada is so dysfunctional that it should not be running the sport until it is cleaned up. Fine. Last year, a Canadian judge argued the same point. Various auditors have refused to endorse the financial records of the multi-million-dollar organization as there was so many opaque transactions.

This is a good start but it is not the answer to the problem.
What Canadian cricket needs is police action: a major task force of anti-organized crime law enforcement moving in to properly fight against the thugs who are threatening the sport.

What is happening at Cricket Canada is not an argument about where to stack the paper clips or repair the computer software. It is about honest officials, coaches and players getting protection against one of the world’s most violent gangs.

If these events were happening in any other industry - banking, construction, manufacturing - and executives were having their homes sprayed with bullets, the police would move in a serious way. But because it is a Canadian sport, aside from ice hockey, the official attitude is the one beloved of Canadian bureaucrats, “There is nothing that we can do…”.

In the meantime, despite this effort from the International Cricket Council, stay tuned for more threats and violence for control of the sport in Canada.

Words don’t stop bullets.

Bits of paper don’t stop gangsters from killing people.

There have been fixers coming to almost every FIFA international tournament since at least 1991. They have approached hundreds of players, coaches, and referees.

In 1995 at the World Youth Championship in Doha, Qatar. Two young Portuguese players had been invited up to a room to discuss an interesting proposition by two attractive young Malay women. When they got there, they discovered a pile of money on the table, three “well-known fixers,” and a group of players from the Cameroon team. The organizers of the tournament escorted the fixers to the airport and let them go - it would have been “too embarrassing” to have the scandal revealed.

Same story, thirteen years later. Women’s World Cup in China. Wilson Raj Perumal, one of the minor players of the big match fixing world was there. He approached some of the Ghanaian national team players. An honest player reported him. He was detained by the police - and, then escorted to the train station and told to leave town. It, of course, would have been “too embarrassing” to put him on trial. Pity. It might have spared a whole host of trouble at later tournaments.

Ten years later, at the 2018 World Cup in Russia there was the outlandish game between Japan and Poland. The last twenty minutes were a travesty of fair play. There was a result that benefited both teams so virtually no player crossed the half-way line with the ball. The fans booed and jeered. A third team - Senegal - was sent home because it did not qualify for the next round.

A skeptic will point out that this was not fixing by a criminal match-fixers just a couple of teams arranging the result of the game to their own mutual satisfaction. Fair point. But the endorsement of corrupt play speaks to the level of governance inside Gianni Infantino’s FIFA. For Japan, who took part in this shameful fix, advanced to the next around because of newly instituted FIFA Fair Prize Rule. They had less yellow or red cards than Senegal - who were eliminated from the tournament.

There are lots of other cases. The former FIFA security head Ralf Mutschke admitted that fixers have been at most of the tournaments to the German media. His honesty probably helped him be ushered out of the building.

It makes no sense.

Why are there fixed matches at the world’s biggest sporting tournament? The games are worth billions of dollars in sponsorship. The stadiums are usually jammed and billions of people around the world watch the games. Before I show you the whys and hows of match-fixing: let me take a moment to explain how I come to my knowledge of what is actually happening at these big football tournaments.

Who I am

I loathe self-promotion so I ask the reader’s graciousness for the next couple of paragraphs. However, I have just done a couple of interviews with major media and realized as I was speaking to the journalists that they did not know my background.

I am the world’s expert on match-fixing in international football. I was an investigative journalist with Canada’s top-rated investigative documentary program - the fifth estate (akin to Panorama or 60 Minutes). I worked in a number of conflict zones, including Kosovo and Iraq. Got my doctorate on a scholarship at the University of Oxford where I had the honour of working with the British Royal Academy member Professor Anthony Heath and one of the world’s top academics in the study of organized crime - Diego Gambetta.

As part of my doctoral research I infiltrated a major match-fixing gang based in Singapore/Thailand/Indonesia. They travel the world fixing the big international sports tournaments. I followed them as they corrupted matches at the World Cup. My two books on the subject are international best-sellers in twenty-one languages and the research helped catalyze over thirty-four national police investigations.

I know match-fixers. I have seen these guys work. Match-fixers will be at the 2026 World Cup in North America.

In the first part of this series we examined three secrets: the tournaments are designed to have dead rubber matches - games where it really matters to only one team that it wins; a lot of the players are under-paid: and many players, coaches, managers and officials are gambling addicts.

In this second part of the series lets get inside that match-fixing world. There is much nonsense and speculation about match fixers but here are two more secrets about this world of corruption.

SECRET 4: The Fixers are intelligent and very well connected

But then in that situation, you just got to manage your fear: and with a prayer and a bit of luck, you can get through it… when we got to the bar, it was just full of kids, 18 to 25, I would say at least 30 of them laptops out…. And these guys were just putting up online gambling sites. They were building the site, adding the banking systems to them, and then launching them online. (They would do one a minute)… Then you wonder why there are 10,000 gambling sites online… They didn’t interfere with me. They let me talk to these young guys. Two of them spoke English very well… One had been educated in America, at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) a major university and he was sort of the guy that was controlling it all.

Interview with Former Match-Fixing Investigator on his visit to the headquarters of a Triad match-fixing-gambling location.

There is an entire “sports integrity” industry based on the monitoring of bets to detect whether there is corruption going on. I will write more of this industry and why it cannot detect fixed matches at the World Cup in Part 3 but for now, realize that the fixers have many contacts inside that industry.

They understand the integrity algorithms and place their bets so that the market cannot understand what they are doing. This is not just the work of a hotshot MIT graduate in the back of a bar, it is the same strategy the big professional gamblers like Tony Bloom, the owner of the English Premier League team Brighton and Hove Albion, uses when he places his bets.

The bookmaking world is not populated by saints or sheep. There are lots of workers at bookmakers (legal and illegal) who if they see a big punt by a known professional gambler or match-fixer would rather duplicate and get the money, than notify the authorities.

“You better get a bullet proof fucking vest“

There are lots of ways of fixing the gambling market so it does not realize that a fix is going on. Much of my conversations with fixers concerns those tactics rather than how to bribe players or referees. Getting players and referees to under perform is relatively easy. Heck! A lot of time you don’t need to convince them. Because the fixers have access to some extraordinary powerful people.

To pull off a fix at the World Cup takes at least a couple of million dollars in ready cash. The players want to be supplied with hundreds-of-thousands, if not millions of dollars (the purported price for two Brazilian players in the 1998 World Cup Final was $5 million). So the fixers need financial backers: people who can move millions of dollars around the world quickly. Around this time, May-early June, the fixers are going to meet their potential investors.

I was present for some of the discussions of who would bankroll the corrupt World Cup matches. The discussions of who their potential investors would be was absolutely mind-boggling: Malaysian Royalty, Singaporean businessmen, Thai politicians and generals. I have never publicly mentioned their names because I have no proof that any of them were actually involved. (The details are with two different lawyers and will be published if anything happens to me). However, someone supplied the fixers with the ready cash that they needed and the World Cup fix happened.

This is unsurprising as the men (and occasionally women) running the Asian gambling world are some of the most powerful people in the society. Bruce Grobbelaar, the former goalkeeper of Liverpool met and took money from Asian match-fixers. He was arrested but never convicted of match-fixing. On the recorded tapes that The Sun newspaper had of his conversations with his “best friend” were descriptions of his trips to play in football tournaments in Malaysia and meetings with the very top people who ran both the country and the gambling syndicates.

Because then you’re fucking him around, and he won’t like it, and he’ll tell his Short Man . . . and then you get the chop and then you better watch it. You better get a bullet proof fucking vest, then . . . That’s how fucking big it is . . . This is how fucking dangerous it is . . . When you’re playing with fucking dangerous men, its fucking dangerous…”

There is an idea among many western academics and journalists that the illegal Asian market is run by a network of small, seedy men at the local news stands. To be fair, their delusions are helped because every four years or so, just before the World Cup, Interpol (the international police agency) helps organize a round up of stand-up guys who take the blame in a theatrical law enforcement exercise of cleaning up the illegal gambling market.

It is all play acting.

The gambling market is run by very powerful people who are never arrested. Sometimes, according to the gamblers and fixers, they are the local police chiefs whom Interpol might be dealing with! The fixers are well-known in this gambling world. They could be arrested in minutes if people were serious about solving the problem but they are not because the fixers have very good relations with these powerful people. They also know many of the National football Association and FIFA officials who run the World Cup.

SECRET 5: The Fixers Know the Officials

Hill: How much trust do you have in the national federations?

Answer: (laughter) We will be honest – sometimes they are the problem! In some cases the leagues run the federations – and the leagues are run by the clubs. So there is a conflict of interest right there. And we know that in some of the places there are irregularities in the leagues…In fact, unless you want to get killed – I would avoid Romania, Ukraine and Turkey. Very dangerous places the mafia runs the place.
Confidential Interview with Senior European Football Officials

A necessary note - not every FIFA, UEFA or national football association (FA) official is corrupt. There are many, many good people in these organizations: administrators who genuinely care about international sport and the good it can bring to societies. Many of them are my sources. They are furious about this kind of corruption.

However, the linkages between officials in some football associations and the match-fixers runs very deep.

In 2022, a series of photos were released by the Bulgarian media outlet The Bureau for Investigative Reporting and Data that show some of the extent of these connections. The photos showed the match-fixer Dan Tan at his annual New Year’s party in Singapore. There were lots of pretty girls and the President of the Bulgarian Football Association Borislav Mihaylov They were also purportedly in business together with a company that arranged a match so bizarre that it had to be annulled. FIFA declared that no national football officials had been involved.

If this story is true - and Mihaylov died last month - then it is matched by the fixers connections at the World Cup in South Africa in 2010. I did a series for the New York Times with a series of confidential reports that showed not only were the fixers orchestrating a series of fixed friendly matches just before the start of the tournament featuring teams that were to play in the World Cup. The fixers were helped by officials inside the South African Football Association.

Geddit?

The world’s biggest sporting tournament - worth billions of dollars - and some of the same officials that organizing the tournament were working with fixers.

That level of collusion was surpassed with the Zimbabwean Football Association. The levels of corruption were so high in that FA the fixers organized a tour of Asia by the national team. During some of the matches, the fixers would come into the dressing room and coach the players on how to perform the fixes that they needed.

It will be the same in this upcoming World Cup tournament. Lots of the FIFA and FA officials are deeply honest and committed to the good of the game but in the 2026 tournament there will be officials whose level of honesty would curl your hair. Look, FIFA was an organization named by the Southern District of New York Court (the place where Mafia groups go on trial) as an organized crime racketeering unit. Since then, one of its top officials - Patrice-Edouard Ngaïssona who helped organize the Club World Cup - has been criminally indicted for war crimes, including summary executions, torture, and sexual offenses.

This week (May 19), theNew York Times published an article about the current Head of Conmebol (the organization that runs South American football) and a key ally of Gianni Infantino, secretly being investigated for stashing away millions of dollars of the remission funds sent back to the organization by the US Department of Justice after the racketeering court case.

The investigation is “secret” because that is the way that FIFA, now, conducts its investigations. No details are revealed or even, in some cases, that an investigation is going on!

My colleague Miguel Maduro of the Catolica University in Lisbon and the former Head of Investigations at FIFA, is quoted in the article, saying, “There’s no transparency whatsoever in how the ethics committee handles complaints, and often no final resolution… Instead of dismissing the complaint or acting on it, they simply many times keep it there and no one knows what they will do.”

With an organization like FIFA running the tournament, is it any wonder that the match-fixers will be there?

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Stay tuned for Part 3 of this series - The Seven Secrets of Why There Will be Match-Fixing at the World Cup - We will explore why no one stops the fixing.

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So what you want, we can deliver to you. After this match, I have a game in the Under-20 World Cup… So Under-20 World Cup first two games they will play, so after the third game, they will do for us because XXXX is our team (names a prominent sub-Saharan national team)… So after first two games they will surely be relegated, so the table they will be below. It means if they lose, it doesn’t matter…They need to take the money and will fix it for us.
Covertly filmed interview with an Asian match-fixer

Here is the first, important and dirty secret: Match-fixing at the World Cup is easy.
The fixers have been coming to the big sport tournaments since at least 1991 – when they approached players at the Under-17 World Cup in Melbourne, Australia. My sources for this are hundreds of players, coaches, referees, national football federation officials, law enforcement and senior FIFA executives (including the former President Sepp Blatter).
The official line is that the fixers are the unluckiest tourists in the world – yes, they come to all these different tournaments but they never succeed. Privately, almost everyone in the inside-FIFA power world knows that the fixers sometimes succeed. They speculate on which games were fixed.
Here are the secrets from inside this world that allow this kind of corruption to continue.

Power point slide from one of my presentations at the University of New Haven, Sports Integrity Certificate, outlining the international soccer tournaments effected by match-fixing. Note – It is almost every single major event in the soccer world

SECRET 1: LOSING TO WIN

American sports leagues are full of corruption. Yet virtually no one speaks about it as match-fixing. Rather almost all the journalists talk about “tanking”. As an outsider, it boggles the mind that anyone would take the NBA, MLB, or NHL seriously. The underperformance of some of the teams in those leagues is so outrageous that much of the games are simply theater.

The key motivation for this type of fixing is the way that the leagues are set up. After a certain “threshold” point (the All-Star Weekend for Baseball) it is apparent that some teams have absolutely no chance of of making the play-offs. It actually benefits those team to lose as many games as possible as they will be rewarded with low draft picks for the next years’ new players.

There is all kinds of talk about changing the system – but the essential truth is that if you lose a lot of games, you will get a better draft pick than if you try hard.

It is the same in European football – il sistema – is alive and well in most southern European leagues. After a certain point in the season, mid-table teams trade points for money or the transfer of players and… (Editor’s note: Declan get back to the story about match-fixing at the World Cup!)

It is the same for the upcoming FIFA World Cup. There are now 700 teams taking part – (actually it is only 48, but it feels like 700). There will be 104 games. The above quote from the match-fixer shows you what will happen. The teams whose administrations are corrupt, and are underpaying their players – will sell their final games in the opening round. In the match-fixers words,“So after first two games they will surely be relegated, so the table they will be below. It means if they lose, it doesn’t matter.”

Bernard Tapie, Owner of Olympique de Marseille, under arrest for match-fixing

If the words of an Asian match-fixer don’t convince you then how about one of Europe’s most-successful businessmen and match-fixers: Bernard Tapie? He was a French cabinet minister, the CEO of Adidas, and owner of Olympique de Marseille. Tapie fixed, with the help of his pals in the Corsican Mafia, the final game of the 1993 French league season. His motive? Marseille could both win the league and have an easy match before the Final of the European Cup (forerunner of the Champions League). When Tapie met the players’ he was bribing, he said, “You are going to lose anyway, why don’t you lose with 30,000 Francs in your pocket?”

SECRET 2: Some of the players don’t get paid

To make this situation worst, the players on some teams at the FIFA World Cup do not get paid.

They should get paid. FIFA allocates every participating national federation millions of dollars to pay for their teams’ travel logistics, hotels, salaries for coaches, players, masseurs, cooks, physiotherapists, etc.

The national federations are supposed to negotiate in good faith with their players for a fair allocation of the money. After all, the fans watch the games to see the players, not some out-of-shape football executive.

Most federations find fair agreements with their players but some of them, particularly from sub-Saharan Africa, the executives of their National Football Association just pocket the cash, buy late model European cars, and give the players cliches about “national development” or “Your work is making our youth program far stronger” or “Our whole country thanks you…”

Meanwhile, the ‘big men’ of the Football Association have flown in their mistresses or wives to stay at five-star hotels, while the players, the actual people who get the team to the prestigious tournament are excluded.

One of the African players I interviewed summed it well, saying, “Whenever someone talks about patriotism and the good of the game – I know I am going to not get paid.”

At the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, most teams brought about 40-50 people: players, coaches, and their support staff. People whose jobs it was to help the players be the very best they could be, The Nigerian team? They brought over-one-hundred-and-fifty people. Most of them “Big Men” with their various females companions. The Nigerian Football Association quickly realized they had a problem: there was not enough room for everybody at the five-star hotel chosen to be the training center for the Nigeria team. The solution? Shift the players to a cheap motel at the side of a highway while the “Big Men” and their ladies stayed in the fancy hotel.
To be clear, I am not accusing the Super Eagles of fixing but I am saying that the team crashed out in the opening round. You can understand why.

Striking Players

Because of this kind of larceny, player strikes are common at the FIFA World Cup tournaments. In 2014, the entire Ghana team declared themselves ready to sit out a game until they got paid. The President of Ghana had to charter a plane and fly it to Brazil with the players’ cash before the players would play.

Two points.

First, the great Sulley Muntari, one of the star midfielders of Ghana, immediately took some of his cash and went for a walk in a local favela – a very poor and often very dangerous Brazilian city neighbourhood. He handed out $100 dollar bills to the inhabitants. His point? It’s not about the money, it is the principle: we deserve to get paid fairly.

Second, the President of the Ghana Football Association was covertly taped by investigative journalists accepting bribes and covert cash payments (unrelated to match-fixing) just before the start of the 2018 World Cup.

SECRET 3: LOTS OF THE PLAYERS ARE GAMBLING ADDICTS

Compounding the issue fo exploitation is an age-old problem: widespread gambling addiction among the players.

Sandro Tonali, Ivan Toney are big players. They are/were on the national teams of two of the best-known football countries – England and Italy – in the world. They were both gambling addicts. Tonali was so badly addicted that he ended up being criminally convicted of betting with an illegal gamblers and settling his bills with Rolex watches.

His practices are reminiscent of the ‘golden generation’ of English Football. Their 2006 World Cup team featured Wayne Rooney, Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard and a host of other great players who never quite dominated for their country as they did for their clubs. Gary Neville, one of their best defenders wrote in his autobiography that many of the team were so badly addicted that they were gambling and losing heavily at card games during the World Cup in Germany. “As well as the problems with the team, I was never thrilled about the gambling culture off the pitch. The amount of time spent on horse racing or cards was ridiculous…Gambling is a cancer in a changing room.”

Now, with the advent of widespread mobile phone gambling the problem is even worst.
In November I was invited to speak on Capitol Hill in Washington about the “Silent, Sporting Plague” of gambling addiction. It is a disease that few dare-mention but it is hitting American athletes very, very hard. It is the same among players at the World Cup.
It does not mean that every player is a gambling addict. Nor does it mean that any of the players I mentioned above ever fixed a match. But it does mean that many of the players at this World Cup know their way around the betting market.
There were even players at the FIFA 2022 World Cup who were connected to the Sapina match-fixing Boys. Quite what they were doing playing at the world’s biggest sporting tournament is anyone’s guess. However, as you will see in Part 2 & 3, of this series (The Seven Secrets of Why There Will be Match-Fixing at the World Cup), there is a whole system designed, established and maintained to investigate but not publicize any suspicious events at a FIFA World Cup – the corruption will go on.

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It’s big.

It’s huge.

If the short sellers’ reports by Muddywaters and Callisto are true, this is the end of Sportradar. There is no possible way for the company to survive.

Note, please, the – if these reports are true – part.

However, the vultures are circling. America being America, class action lawyers have set up shop trawling for customers. Three different sets of government regulators are – purportedly – reviewing the company’s actions. The stock fell 22.6% in one day.

Sportradar is not just a sports company or a gambling company, in some people’s view, it is the “anti-corruption agency” for sports.

They are not an anti-corruption agency and they have a huge problem.

When I was in Moscow researching a TV documentary about the close personal, political and financial links between star National Hockey League (NHL) players and the Russian mafiya, one of my interviews was with an organized crime police officer. I am asked him whether the story was true. He confirmed it, but said, “Don’t worry! The NHL players only work with the nice Mafiya.”

The problem is that if you are a NHL player, there is no such thing as a ‘nice’ Mafia to be working with. Sportradar, if these allegations are true, is in the same place. If half or a quarter or even a tenth of the short sellers’ reports are true, Sportradar has an existential problem.

The breadth and extent of the allegations against Sportradar are staggering: contacts with banned, sanctioned Russian oligarchs; commercial links to human traffickers; close relationships with Turkish mobsters: 270 large customers that are criminal bookmakers; and the very basis of their corporate profits linked directly to the illegal gambling market. These issues are known in the C-Suite and the company directly lies about it all. This is the substance of the allegations (unproven as yet in a court of law) against Sportradar.

These are not ‘nice Mafia’ issues. If you are a sports integrity company you cannot afford to have even a small part of these allegations be true. If you are a sports league you cannot afford to be doing business with such a company if even a small part of these allegations are true.

Let’s take a look at these allegations – always with the idea that they are, at this moment, simply unproven stories. First, an explanation to readers who do not follow sports gambling, why this is a massive story for you.

Why You Should Care

Sportradar is a giant. It works with the National Basketball Association (NBA) & Women’s NBA (basketball), Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) (tennis), NHL (hockey), NASCAR, Professional Fighters League (PFL), United Soccer League, Bundesliga (German soccer), UEFA (all of European soccer). Major League Baseball (MLB), arguably one of the most symbolic of all American sports, has equity stakes in the company.*

FIFA – the organization that runs all soccer in the world – essentially, shut down much of its integrity department and outsourced the work to Sportradar. The company is, largely, in charge of protecting the integrity of the upcoming FIFA World Cup tournament (Good luck with that task! Match fixing at the World Cup is a constant problem because … Editor’s note – Declan please stick to this story. You will write more about match-fixing at the World Cup in another article! )

Remember, pre-May 14, 2018 when sports gambling was illegal in North America and the sports leagues professed to hate gambling? A lot of leagues actually loved gambling because it stimulated interest in their sport but they had to pretend not because it threatened the integrity of the product with fixing and corruption.

Sportradar did away with all those concerns. Their argument, that convinced sports leagues everywhere, was that they would monitor all the betting odds and warn sports leagues if/when there was any corrupted, odd movements in the gambling market that signaled match-fixing.

Cue a massive, societal shift led by sports leagues to get into gambling. Actually massive does not really begin to describe the shift. Now, it is impossible to watch almost any professional sports event without being bombarded with gambling advertisements.

Sportradar helped pave that transformation, except that their role is fundamentally misunderstood by most sports people.

Data – the Gold Dust of the Sports Industry

Sportradar is not really a sports integrity company, it is a data company that happens to do sports integrity. Their real profits come from making deals with leagues for the data from the sports events. Data means fast, access to information like who is scoring the next point, how are they are scoring it, the numbers on all the players jerseys, whether the next serve will be left or right handed, if a team wins the first half/quarter but loses the game, or if the pitcher will throw a ball or a strike. There are thousands of data points in every sports event and Sportradar vacuums up that information in exclusive deals with sports leagues and sells it in-real-time to bookmakers. This data is worth billions of dollars to bookmakers. It is the life blood of their product.

What this means is a three-way conflict of interest: the sports leagues hire Sportradar to monitor their integrity and sell them their data: Sportradar sells the data to the bookmakers: the bookmakers sponsor the sports leagues. Thus, no one has an interest in discussing any major match-fixing or corruption issue as it will effect their bottom line.

Even for a relative expert like myself, the reports feature hundreds of pages and dozens of mind-boggling, alleged conflict of interests between criminals, Sportradar and their charismatic chair Carsten Koerl. So I will focus on only one important and seemingly systemic issue.

The Long Tail of Addiction

In 2018, professional tennis finally got around to recognizing the extent of match-fixing in their sport. Independent investigators called it a “tsunami” in the lower levels of tennis. They proposed a novel solution – ban betting on these lower levels where players don’t get paid very much. The argument was simple: no betting data, no gambling, no fixing. Sportradar provided bookmakers with data on these matches. The investigators strongly recommended that this relationship end. Sportradar fought back with the argument that if they did not supply the data to bookmakers illegal operatives would provide it and tennis would not get any money for it.
I never understood the debate. Why did it matter? Why was it worth all this money to get betting data on small games in small tournaments. It seemed a waste of time for Sportradar, bookmakers and the tennis industry: very little benefit with lots of risk of match-fixing.

The argument presented in the short seller’s report – again unproven – is that these games are actually massively important for the entire gambling industry. It ties in with a dark secret at the heart of the gambling that almost everybody knows but few people talk about in public: much of the betting industry is driven by addicts.
I interviewed an illegal bookmaker in the Philippines. He was British and had worked both sides of the fence, he said: “The real business model of a lot of bookmakers is rely on the degenerates. They will talk about ‘family entertainment’ but really the average gambler is a loss to these bookmakers… The real money is to be made by identifying the heavy loser…The kind of person who would gamble away the baby’s diaper money.”
These words are supported by a 2021 report for the House of Lords from the charity – Gambling Aware.Their research showed that 86% of the profits of legal, sports bookmakers come from only 5% of their clients. The key to become a successful bookmaker is to find as many of the 5% as possible and supply them with what they want.
Addicts need their gambling fixes 24/7 – 365 days a year. They may start their betting addiction on games in large leagues but an important part of a bookmaker’s product line is the ability to supply games wherever in the world at whatever time an addict wants to bet.
There was a bookmakers shop in the working class area where I wrote my doctoral thesis. I would go in there cup of tea in hand (alcohol was banned). There were people who come in and bet on the big, old school bets – who would win the next Premier League game – but much of the clientele were the dozens of addicts who hung around the shop ready to bet on anything. Every ten minutes or so the bookmakers would have computer generated greyhound races. AI animated dogs would run around a fake track, while an announcer – also fake – would shout out the commentary. This was the product that kept the regulars coming back: events that kept the dopamine in their addicted brains looped in.
This is why supplying data for small leagues and small games is important for Sportradar. This is the kind of service that helps their bookmarking clients make lots of money. This ‘long tail’ goes deep in gambling and Sportradar, specifically, helped developed interest in niche games and leagues: Polish ping pong players batting the ball back and forth in empty gyms. One deranged bettor in Oregon, allegedly, bet $35,000 dollars on one of those games.
All this is not illegal. It is the way of the gambling world. Micro bets which allow corrupted Major League pitchers are based on this kind of gambling, but it is not particularly moral nor does it protect sports against match-fixing and if you are Sportradar that is supposed to be what you do.

The Caveat

A couple of obvious points. You build up a multi-billion-dollar company, like Sportradar, in less than twenty-years you are going to make a lot of enemies. Some of those enemies had a hand in crafting these reports. Their business rivals are probably dancing in delight and opening bottles of champagne. The reports were written by short sellers, meaning the whole point of the reports are that they are designed to make a company’s shares decline – job done.

Carsten Koerl, the CEO of Sportradar has responded by writing on LinkedIn and in an investors call, (April 28) that the claims are, “False, misleading and defamatory…We do not work with black market operators. For the grey market, we have a solid compliance structure in place, and we only work with licensed operators… I get a lot of support from all sides. Some regulators contacted our teams, they explained to them the situation, and that’s an ongoing process.”

This may be true, but Sportradar has a very tough road ahead – because if only a small portion of the short sellers claims are proven than it has a ‘nice Mafia’ problem and their company should be folded up and put out with the trash.

* Note in an earlier version of this post I made the mistake of claiming that the National Football League were still had an equity stake in Sportradar. They used to have these shares but no longer… My apologies for the error.

What a day this has been! The journalistic equivalent of you-wait-for-hours and then-5 buses-all-come-along-at-once. There are at least five major stories that have broken today. For now, here are some points on two of those stories - more later on the other scandals.

The Dark Secret at the Heart of the Sportradar Controversy

This is a MASSIVE story. The alleged collusion of the multi-billion-dollar company Sportradar with criminals in the illegal bookmaker world. The company is the darling of both the investment community, the provider of ‘integrity service’ for organizations like the ATP, NBA and WNBA, NHL, MLB, MLS, PGA TOUR, UEFA, FIFA, CONMEBOL, AFC, and the Bundesliga, and the unknowing ‘experts’ of the sports integrity community.

Not any more it ain’t…

This week, two short-selling, investment research companies took a look at Sportradar’s business practices. Sportradar’s stock valuation fell like a stone: 28% in 48 hours which is approximately $500 million. The stock is starting to recover now (Friday, April 24) and I am reading very, very carefully the reports by these short selling companies, speaking to Sportradar insiders and outsiders - will write more about the issue next week.

A few points:

First, the obvious - there are lots of genuinely good people inside Sportradar.

Two, the people writing the reports are short sellers. In other words, they profit from the fall in value of Sportradar’s stocks that their reports have brought about - that is an acknowledged, walking/talking conflict of interest.

Three, however, lots of what they write seems accurate. Sportradar has always seemed to me lots of smoke and mirrors. In my opinion by selling sports leagues the image that they could always spot corruption through monitoring of the betting data, Sportradar has made a comfy situation for lots of people who should not be in business bed together: sports leagues and bookmakers.

It gets worse in that Sportsradar is itself in part owned by Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association - so you have a circuit of conflicts: the leagues provide the data to Sportradar which sells it to the bookmakers who sponsor the leagues.*

Sportradar’s Carsten Koerl itself, responded to the reports with an open letter to the “global sports community”:

“There are numerous allegations in these reports that are either entirely false, poorly researched, deliberately taken out of context or, at best, repackaging the same tired stories we have heard for years. Then there are the specific claims regarding my supposed ties with Russian oligarchs. I believe these were thrown in to promote controversy and take advantage of the current news cycle.”

The Secret

“[Sportradar] SRAD’s CEO likes to call his company the FBI of gambling. The FBI does not offer to introduce informants to human traffickers at trade shows.”
Muddywaters Research Company, April 22, 2026

The essential accusation made by the short sellers, is that Sportradar served both the legal and illegal side of the sports gambling market. As the MuddyWaters researchers, after allegedly being introduced by Sportradar executives to illegal Asian bookmakers, describe it, “Putting the BET into Aiding and Abetting.”
This is a massive scandal but ummm… almost everybody does that in the gambling market.

The line between the legal and illegal market is wafer-thin in the betting market.

It is all a little like the environmental charity world: Greenpeace vs. Sea Shepherd - all the environmentalists know each other, they love and hate each other depending on the moment, they date the same people, they all eat at the same vegan restaurant and many of the executives work at one company and then switch to another.

At the International Casino Exhibition(ICE) which is the big event for sports bookmakers around the world. All the sports gambling come to it both legal and illegal markets.

Suicide, Public Health and Legal Sports Gambling

Today, I am at the Northeastern University Public Health Advocacy Institute conference about the public health issues around online gambling. There are lots of impassioned speeches about the risks of the gamblification of our sports, communities, and countries. There are people who have lost their family through suicide to online sports gambling addiction. But in the discussion there are no appeals against the ‘illegal market’. In the discussion about the public health effects of sports gambling there is no difference around the legal and illegal market.

The Massachusetts State Senator John Keenan spoke about the similarities of the sports gambling industry between the Purdue created Opioid epidemic that caused millions of deaths in the United States. He said, “The sports gambling companies [have been] using the same playbook [as Purdue], using the same tools, refusing responsibilities in the same way, we have to hold them accountable.”

More analysis of the Sportradar situation to come as soon as possible.

PS. One story to emerge from the conference - the State of New Jersey is moving towards banning all micro bets on US sports.

* My apologies in an earlier draft of this article, I wrote that the sports league with equity stakes in Sportradar was the National Football League (NFL). This was an error - please accept my apologies for this slip-up.

Indian Organized Crime in Canadian Sport

Last week, my former colleagues at the fifth estate - Canada’s equivalent of 60 Minutes/Panorama did an EXCELLENT investigation in the alleged links between the Lawrence Bishnoi organized crime group and international cricket, specifically, the Canadian Cricket Association and their World Cup team that was linked to spot fixing, bribery and corruption.

I will write more about their work in another post but for now, a few points. It is good to see the fifth estate - finally - return to their glory days. All programs go through high points and low points. For years, the fifth estate was a dirge of historical victim-of-the-week stories: lots of worthy people speaking about issues that happened decades ago, instead of holding current politicians or officials to account.

The fifth estate celebrated breaking this mold by focusing on South Asian organized crime in Canada.

It is about bloody time!

It is genuinely difficult to state the sway that Indian/Pakistani/Sri Lanka goondas have held over their Canadian immigrant counterparts. The range of high-level drug trafficking, thuggery, extortion, political assassination attempts, killings, and the worst terrorist attack in the western world until 9/11 all held sway in Canada’s South Asian communities. But every time journalists or police officials would try to bring attention to these issues we had to go through the ‘systemic racism’ argument that essentially made more victims and stopped any accountability to the bullies within the community.

This nonsense seems to be stopping and the result is exceptional journalism like Cricket Corruption - watch here:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/cricket-canada-allegations-fifth-estate-9.7167081

Stay tuned - a lot of stories have emerged in the last 24-hours…

The Great Don Bradman in action – his picture was the background slide for this part of the speech

I arrived on Monday, exhausted, and tired after a three day journey from America. I won’t bore you with the details – myself and the organizers wanted to get me here in a way that respected the Australian taxpayers – but it featured a typhoon in Manila, Philippines and lots of long flights cramped at the back of the plane.

The Customs and Border Protection officer at Sydney Airport welcomed me with your casual but deeply warm way and asked me how my journey was. I told him it had been a long one and he said, “Fair on you, mate. Now you can enjoy yourself and stay a long time.”

“I am afraid not, I fly back in a couple of days.”
“What?! You came all that way and you are going to make a speech then turn around and go back. Why? Why would you come all that way to do that?”

I didn’t have time to properly tell him. It was not the time or place, so I just said a few words and went off to get a coffee but this is what I wanted to say to him about why I made this journey.

The last time I was in Australia I had to get up at 5.00 a.m. to go from Beerwah in Queensland up to Gladstone on the Coast of the Great Barrier Reef. I drove in the pre-dawn light along the iconic National Highway No.1 through towns whose very names are symbolic of Australia: Yandina, Gympie, Maryborough, Howard, and Childers.

It was the not the true Outback but it was still Country and in many of those small towns have seen far, far better days and are facing difficult challenges but in each place, at the very center of the community is a true sporting infrastructure.

In the early dawn, I saw a scene in front of one of the town’s swimming pools. A Mum, and her two daughters, they must have been about 10 and 12 years old. The mother was carrying two enormous bags of swimming equipment and one of her daughters who was running ahead to get to her practice had absolutely nothing in her hands. She turned and made a joke at her Mum. You could see in that brief vignette, the Mum who had gotten up probably far earlier than she had wanted to drive her children to swimming practice, festooned with her daughter’s swimming kit, she. She smiled back to her daughter and their entire relationship – like Bingo and Bluey four or five years later – encapsulated in that one happy moment of family life.

About an hour later, I drove into another town I don’t want to embarrass myself or show a lack of respect for I am not sure of the name of the place, but I do want to say that there was, in this small Australian town, a beautiful footie pitch. Its deep green grass was bathed in a golden light of dawn. There were half-a-dozen lads, perhaps thirteen, fourteen years old, hacking about with a ball – laughing and having a good time. There was one man standing on the side of the pitch having a cup of tea. You know him. I don’t mean you know that particular man but you know people like him. He was wearing a white t-shirt and shorts, his tummy bulged out over his shorts like a whale surfacing the sea. He was wearing a ridiculously wide sun hat – but you know that he had also gotten up early, gone done to the practice field and unlocked it – why? So the lads could play footie. No ulterior motive. Nothing of the subjects that we, sadly, have been discussing today. Just a good guy or as you say here, a decent bloke, sacrificing his own comfort so that the kids could play.
Those are the people that are the true embodiment of Australian sport. There are tens-of-thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of them in every community in this great sporting country. No one pays them. There is not some rich sponsorship deal. There is not a TV contract. When my friend and inspiration David Howman, who is here today, is fighting the good fight in the halls of the big sports organizations like the International Olympic Committee he does not see them there.

But this great nation of athletes is built on those people. The coaches, the parents, the referees, the officials, the umpires, the ones who don’t get paid. The ones who are doing it not for ambition or personal gain but just because it is the right thing to do – to spread the joy of sports to as many people as possible.

Because of those people, Australia is a great sporting nation.

They teach their people a particular, unmatched spirit that shows up wherever you are in Australia: the country towns of Queensland, the mining communities in Western Australia, or here in cosmopolitan Melbourne.

So what is that spirit of Australian sport?

Let me share a few stories that encapsulate the true nature of Australian spirit of sport.

The Proverbial Middle Finger

In 1912, the International Olympic Committee, finally, got around to allowing women to compete at swimming races at the Stockholm Olympics. Two Australian women promptly announced they were going to go compete. And just as quickly, the head of the Australian Swimming Association, a woman, announced that no Australian woman would ever swim in a pool in front of men. In response the two women gave the Association the proverbial middle finger and fund raised their own money, took passage on ship and traveled around the world with their sisters as their chaperons to compete in the first ever 100-meters Olympic Female Swimming event.

They won. They won the gold and silver medals.

Job done: IOC declares a new sport for women, Australian women travel around the world, and win the event.

Sixty years later, the ABC – the Australian Broadcasting Corporation – tracked down one of those women and asked what it was like to win the gold medal at the Stockholm Olympics and this, grandmum-type woman wearing a cardigan and glasses shrugged and said, “I just went to Stockholm and did the same thing at the Olympics that I did every day with my mates at Bondi Beach.”

That’s the spirit of Australian sport.

Fanny Durack and Mina Wylie became the first gold medal winners for Australia but their generation’s “glamour girls”

Losing Count

It was the same at the Montreal Special Olympics. Please forgive me. I am a man who is bad with the right title and the correct, current names but it was the first Olympics held for people who have physical and mental challenges. In the 10,000 meters there was a young woman who did not just win, she dominated the event. She was swimming laps ahead of the rest of the competition. The commentary of her final lap is the stuff of TV history. It went something like this, “The Australian swimmer is coming down to the final few meters, she has smashed the Olympic record, she has smashed the World Record, there she goes the winner of the 10,000 Meters – but she has kept going!!! She has lost count of her laps…”

Sure enough the young Australian swimmer, had forgotten how many laps she had swum and her coach and one of the Olympic officials were literally running down the side of the pool waving and flagging her down to stop. She does about three-quarters down the pool and her head emerges looking around to see what happened. Her coach is jumping up and down with joy and the official is giving her the thumbs up.

Now, if you watch the video on YouTube there are, of course, the negative comments – the stupid making very stupid comments about the swimmer and her challenges.

But not me – her guts, her determination, alone against the world, never giving up, her absolute refusal to never stop whatever happens – that’s the spirit of Australian sport.

Never an Easy Race

It was the same thing that I witnessed in 2009. I was in Rome on personal business. The World Aquatic Championship was happening in the Mediterranean port of Ostia. I deeply respect Italian history and culture but sometimes, as a man, I find their masculinity a little garish – the medallions around the necks, the macho swagger and boasting. The Italians were like that summer. I don’t blame them. Ostia was the same town where the Romans had established their connection to the sea over-two-thousand years ago. The Italians thought they had the keynote event – the 25 km sewn up. Their long-distance champion was the best in the world. Ostia was his place. The Mediterranean is an Italian swimming pool. It was going to be a nice, easy race.

But there was an Australian there. As the world knows, but the Italians forgot, it is never an easy race when there is an Australian there.

All of Italy was transfixed to their television screens on long hot day as the Australian swimmer turned that 25 kilometre swim in open waters into a sprint. The two men raced each other into the harbour after a race where first one and then and another had taken the lead.

Three years later, the same Australian swimmer came back to Europe to swim the English Channel and established the fastest time ever recorded – a time that still stands.

That’s the spirit of Australian sport.

Trent Grimsey, the World Swim Record holder of the English Channel.

A Sports Shrine

When you are an Australian athlete you walk in a long line of great athletes going back two hundred years who have manifested the spirit of Australian sport. Let us make no mistake – we are not standing alone in this room. We are surrounded by the spirits and great ghosts of those who have gone before us.

Because we are not in a business meeting, not in a conference room, not in a sports stadium but in a shrine. The Melbourne Cricket Club as you know better than me was built in honour of the 11 men of your nation that went to England on August 29, 1882 and took on the class-conscious English with all their own jokes about colonials, at their own game, in their own country, in their own home – their MCC, The Oval cricket ground – and beat them. Beat them so badly you made the sport your own.

That is why I am here – for the spirit of Australian sport.

That is why I sat at the back of the plane, in cramped and crunched circumstances – for the spirits of Australian sport.
Please, don’t tell me that there is not a single person in this room who would not have done the same thing for the sake of Australian sport.

Please don’t tell me that there is anyone in this room who if they got a call at 3.00 a.m saying that there was an athlete in trouble – would not get up and fight to protect the spirit of Australian sport.

Please don’t tell me that sport – wherever it is played – be it in your country, mine or anywhere in the world – is not worth that fight.

Please don’t tell me that all those sports scandals we have spoken about today: all those athletes who are betrayed by the conflict of interests, the corruption, the crime are not worth the fight.

This is our moment. This is our time and tide. It is our generation. From the failing hands of those who have gone before us are passed the torches to us now.

It is our job to protect sport. It can be saved. It should be saved. It must be saved.

Thank you.

The Ashes Winning Australian Cricket Team of 1882

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Dr. Lee was the founder of my College at the University of New Haven. He was still working hard at age 86-years-old. We had several, long, intense conversations about various cases. At another time, I will write about his effect on me and his extraordinary personality but for now here is an reissue of an interview with Dr. Lee from 2021.

We spoke about one of his most famous mysterious death cases and to hear his description of blood stain splatter, DNA, and crime scene investigation is to hear from a true master.

**

It was a killing that involved a Hollywood actress, one of the greatest musicians that America has ever produced, and a mystery that took almost 12 years two court trials and three legal appeals to resolve.

Lana Clarkson, Hollywood actress, in happier days

On February 2, 2003. Phil Spector, the man behind the Beatles album ‘Let it Be’, John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, George Harrison’s ‘My Sweet Lord’, and countless other top music hits, left his Los Angeles mansion. He came back at midnight with a gorgeous blonde actress, Lana Clarkson. They got drunk. He played the piano, they sang. But at two o’clock in the morning, there was a single gunshot that echoed over the neighborhood. And then Phil Spector stepped out of the door and said, “I think I just shot her”.

Phil Spector at the murder trial

Or did he?

Because when the man known as America’s modern-day Sherlock Holmes began to investigate, it was not so clear.

On CrimeWaves podcast - a master class with Dr. Henry C. Lee.

Dr Lee was the first pioneer of the linkage between DNA analysis and detective work. He is an expert in crime scene analysis and a superb investigator. He trains police forces around the world but, in this episode, he talks about this high-profile Hollywood crime case, the tragedy surrounding it and the attack on his professional reputation.

Listen here at:

or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you are new to investigations this will lay out the essential tools.

If you have extensive experience in other types of investigations, we will teach the specific resources and challenges in investigating different cases in sports integrity.

In short, if you want to fight against organized crime and corruption in sports - this is the program for you. We will have match-fixers, professional gamblers, bookmakers, police, prosecutors with direct, real life experience teaching what they do and how to beat them.

Two weeks of online preparation work - and then, three days on site in beautiful Lisbon -

June 1- 3, 2026 - at the prestigious Catolica School of Law, in Lisbon, Portugal.

The other professors are extraordinary. The Dean of Law - Miguel Maduro - was the former Integrity leader at FIFA who resigned when senior people asked to influence his investigations. His knowledge of international sports laws is unparalleled.

Nicholas Raudenski , the former Homeland Security agent who worked anti-match-fixing at FIFA and UEFA and the Head of Investigations at the International Testing Agency (ITA). He has a deep knowledge of both sides of the fence.

As for the guest lecturers - they will blow your mind.

If you are a poor student or come from a sports association that will not/cannot support your application there may be scholarships available. Details to follow but do apply:

E-mail the Global School of Law at:
ee.law.sede@ucp.pt
**
It was a wonderful course and I enjoyed every part of it. I give my highest praise for the course. It was very practical and applicable, highly engaging, and simply one of the best courses I have attended so far.

I would like to share with you my gratitude for the great course on Sports Corruption and Integrity. What can I say! My expectations were exceeded. The course indeed blew my mind.

The course exceeded my expectations in terms of how the lectures were delivered, and the course content was taught. It was an additional benefit to have such a diverse student group which allowed for some nuanced perspectives.

It was eye-opening, shocking and inspiring at the same time – inspiring because there are so few investigators working in sports integrity so there's an opening for us/me. And motivating because the problems are vast.

I thought Nick Raudenski's investigation class, in particular the power, art and technique of interviewing, was tremendous and especially useful. I learned a lot from that. And finally I enjoyed the intro to match fixing by Declan Hill on the first Zoom call, I thought that was a great way to start the course.

Again, like so many other things around the Epstein death an almost unbelievable perplexing lack of investigation - the guard was never asked to explain under oath the origin of these payments.

Nor was the five page handwritten summation of the other prisoners’ description of who was actually responsible for Epstein’s death ever publicly revealed - until now.

It is the $64 million dollar question.

The audience, mostly sleepy tennis executives and sales people on an early Sunday morning in the near-empty conference center, leaned forward, when I asked it to Tim Donaghy.

Tim Donaghy, the former National Basketball Association (NBA) referee who had worked with gamblers connected with organized crime, and I were on stage together this weekend. It was the final day of the RacquetX Conference in Fort Lauderdale - a massive event attended by almost every tennis, squash, badminton, paddle ball, pickle ball and table tennis official in the sport world.

Donaghy and I had been invited in to speak about the tsunami of match-fixing and gambling addiction that is flowing over professional sports.

Donaghy spoke passionately about his fight with addiction that had caused him to gamble on every sports event he could - from golf tournaments to NCAA College Football to, of course, his own NBA games.

When he was betting on other sports, he had a success rate like almost every other dopey punter. But when he bet on NBA games, the mob called him “Elvis”. He had a success rate of roughly 80%. In the betting world, that is unheard of - anything over 53% a year is considered phenomenal for professional gamblers.

So I asked him the question.

It is the question that hangs around everything that he does. It is the question that catalyzed the Netflix documentary about the Donaghy scandal in 2019. It is the question that causes NBA fans of a certain age to argue long into the night.

Did you, Tim Donaghy, fix games when you were a NBA Referee?

The System in America

One of the things that I have learned since moving to the United States is that corruption is the system. It is not outside the system. It is not, anymore, bribes in brown envelopes or cash payments to cops on the street. Rather the whole American system moves by and for corruption. The examples are all around you in this great, but deeply misguided, country.

I first witnessed the process in Iraq. No insult to American soldiers, but they could get Dunkin Donuts, expensive, military high tech, and air cover for their patrols, but they couldn’t win the war. That was not an exception, the US military has not won a conflict in thirty-five years - despite spending trillions of taxpayer dollars, and almost a million people killed.

No insult to American nurses, doctors but the US medical system is the most expensive in the world yet no only do twenty-seven million people (the population of Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway combined) not have any coverage - the United States ranks below any of their industrial rivals for successful health outcomes.

And this season Sacramento Kings, Utah Jazz, and the Washington Wizards are tanking. This is the uniquely American sports phenomenon where professional teams deliberately lose games so they can get better draft picks the next season.

For the average American sports journalist, when tanking is mentioned they do their usual slavering, licking of the corporate boot that is kicking them in their teeth, and write po-faced articles and media hits about how difficult it is to stop underperformance in the NBA.

However, for average sports fans, tanking - is sporting blasphemy. The fans pay their hard-earned money and the teams lose on purpose.

It is everywhere in American professional sports. The system literally runs on tanking. There are academic papers studying the ‘threshold point’ of seasons when teams start to deliberately lose.

In baseball, four years ago, the billionaire owners locked the players out in a labour action. It was mostly over salaries but one issue was tanking. The players wanted to play every game to the best of their abilities. The owners wanted to be able to tank without any back chat from their uppity athletes. It is there in the legal contracts between the players and the owners.

After their latest round of deliberate under-performance, Mark Cuban, the mouthy, minority owner of the Dallas Mavericks, said, “Few can remember the score from the last game they saw or went to… They can’t remember the dunks or shots….The NBA should worry more about fan experience than tanking.” Which is effectively saying the fans do not care if their teams win or lose - news to most sports people.

Tanking is a pretty easy phenomenon to stop. The sports leagues just have to fine one team a huge amount of money. If that doesn’t stop the problem then the leagues should just force the franchise owners to sell the team.

But that does not happen.

It is America. The corruption is the system.

The Donaghy Defense

Donaghy’s essential defense (and this is a paraphrase of his comments on stage) is, “No, I did not deliberately fix games. I just knew that the NBA of that era was so corrupt. They would tell us, the refs, which teams they wanted to win. I knew which referees liked which teams and players. I just knew the system and I bet on the existing corruption.”

Well, he would say that wouldn’t he?

After all, Donaghy served a year-and-a-half in jail, where he was attacked by an inmate who claimed to be linked with the Gambino Crime Family. Why would he admit to more crime?

To be fair, Donaghy wrote an entire book - Personal Foul - arguing his point. The book is excellent and in it he gives examples of play-off series that were pushed to seven games to maximize everyone’s profits. At the conference presentation he spoke about the NBA promoting “refereeing the names on the jerseys, not the game.”

To back up these assertion he told the story of during one of officiating a game in Philadelphia between the 76ers and the, then-dominant, Chicago Bulls. He called a foul on Michael Jordan. Here is the excerpt from Personal Foul:

By 1996, I had been in the league a couple of years, still trying to do things the right way. I’ll never forget a pivotal moment in a game in Philadelphia I was refereeing with Ed T. Rush. The 76ers’ opponent was the Chicago Bulls. That year, the league office showed us film of a particular spin move players were utilizing on the baseline. By rule, if the ball wasn’t out of the player’s hand before he lifted his pivot foot, he should be called for a traveling violation. The trailing ref was supposed to watch for that play because the other referee would be under the basket with an obstructed view. I was the trailing ref that night when Michael Jordan made that exact spin move on the baseline, and I called a travel. I waved off his basket and 20,000 people—presumably Philadelphia fans—started screaming at me. I couldn’t believe it.

A timeout was called and Jordan and Bulls coach Phil Jackson rushed over. Jordan was in shock. He wasn’t angry—just puzzled. His attitude seemed to be, it’s okay to call that violation, but don’t call it on me!

By the time Phil Jackson reached me, he had his hands in the air. What are you doing? he asked, stunned by the call.

Phil, I said, that’s the travel they told us to call.

They don’t want that called on him, Jackson said, pointing at Jordan. And Jordan added, You’re gonna call that on me?

I recall thinking, What is everyone complaining about? The Bulls knew what was expected of them. I was just as puzzled looking back at them as they were looking at me. Nobody had any answers for me, and it was something I definitely wanted to talk about with the other referees after the game. It was strange; the whole place was booing me. Why were the Philadelphia fans upset at me for calling a travel on the Bulls? The simple answer is that everyone—even the 76ers fans—paid to see Michael Jordan work his magic with the basketball. It was basically a show, and my call was getting in the way of the star performer.

After the game, I went over to Ed T. Rush, one of the top referees on the staff, and said, Ed, that’s the spin move we saw on the tapes. Why did I catch so much heat?

He shook his head and looked at me as if I had just fallen off the back of a cabbage truck. You have to think about who you’re calling it on, he said.

**

This is America. The system is the corruption.

94-years-ago, on March 12th of 1932, one of the richest men in the world, Ivar Kreuger, went into his Paris apartment. He never came out again.

At first, his death was declared a suicide and the authorities quickly burnt his body - despite orders to the contrary. Then thirty-three years later Ivar Kreuger’s brother, mistress, and many others, came forward to say his death was murder.

The list of potential suspects is a very long one. It includes the Soviet KGB (very active in France at the time), the French government, Swedish business rivals, Anglo-American banks... but one thing is certain. Two days after his death, Kreuger was due to travel to Berlin to help fund the then-democratic government in Germany. He never made it to the meeting, and the government fell, leading to the rise of Adolf Hitler.

His death, in short, was life-changing for hundreds-of-millions of people around the world. Today, we examine Ivar Kreuger’s incredible life, loves, and his mysterious death.

#coldcase #unsolvedmurders #murdermystery #ww2 #truecrime #truecrimepodcast

The Flip

On July 29, 2019, Jeffrey Epstein had been in the hell-hole of the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) for twenty-four, eventful days. He had been, allegedly, attacked by an ex-cop, who would be convicted of four murders, one with a plastic tie around his victim’s neck. Epstein had sent days in the harsh conditions of the ‘Suicide Watch’ unit of the MCC. He had spent up to 12 hours a day in the prison’s office for lawyer-client meeting rooms surviving on vending machine food. On that day, we now know, his lawyers began discussions - very general ones - with the district attorneys about a possible deal. In other words, Epstein was signalling his potential willingness to get out of jail by naming more powerful people engaged in criminal activities.

Okay...

Who are those people and what were their crimes?

We don’t know from the documents released yet - I attach them below. The - Jeffrey Epstein Significant Case notification (dated August 15, 2019) that is five days after his body was discovered - only mentions that the defense lawyers discussed in “very general terms” the idea of a deal for Epstein’s release.

However, it does give a very powerful motivation for homicide. If you were a powerful person with ties to Epstein, the best way of guaranteeing his silence is, murder.

The Silence

We now have a selection of Epstein’s emails. You can find them at:

https://jmail.world/

The key point is that his inbox - allegedly - goes almost silent after July 6, 2019 (his arrest). There are a couple from an ex-girlfriend Cecile Steen, some junk mail-outs, but little else. If this is the genuine state of his inbox (more of that later), it shows a man who had plenty of chums before his arrest but afterwards, almost everyone he knows cutting off communication.

This silence could lead someone to thoughts of self-harm: “I was popular, now I am nobody’s man...” But it also shows the way his previous friends regarded him as someone to be avoided or, potentially, silenced permanently.

What Does it Take?

The standards of incompetence in the Epstein case gives a lie to any Law and Order TV program about the abilities of the FBI or DoJ investigators. In the CrimeWaves episodes, I have already been through much of their sheer ineptitude: the destroyed evidence, the disturbed crime scene, the non-disclosure of the wounds on Epstein’s body in the official autopsy report, the broken camera system, the destruction of the video of the July 23rd attack/suicide attempt, etc. HOWEVER, there is one more mistake that has gotten the Internet abuzz with conspiracy chatter: the Southern District of New York Attorney’s Office released a statement about Jeffrey Epstein’s death, with the date before he actually died.

For the record, I do not think the District Attorneys of the Southern District planned the murder of their famous prisoner. But I do think it is a good example of how utterly incompetent many of the government officials were in this case.

They are Still Holding the Important Details Back

There is so much that we, the public, still do not know about the Epstein Case. I will let people who know more American politics point out how many famous people and powerful politicians have already been shown to be lying about their relationships with Jeffrey Epstein (step forward - Howard Lutnick, Donald Trump’s Secretary of Commerce and Bill Gates, the man hugely influential in the American public health response to Covid, among many other things).

Jon Stewart is brilliant! - More at

However, there are millions of pages of documents still to be released. What is in those documents that needs to be held back? What details of Epstein’s final days may emerge?

Even the much examined video footage of the correctional officer’s unit is largely useless. It is not the “raw” unprocessed video but a compilation of a number of different files. Any “missing minutes” or flashes of orange jumpsuits going up the stairs at 10.40 p.m. on the night of his death are still conjecture as the video files that were put together are not complete.

Stay tuned. There is more to come.

The New York Post’s excellent review of the issues with the new video discoveries near Epstein’s cell. More at: