Federal prosecutors charge 26 men with alleged conspiracy to manipulate college basketball games
PHILADELPHIA — Late in February 2024, a North Carolina basketball trainer sent a text to a DePaul men’s basketball player during halftime of the team’s game against Georgetown. He wanted to let the player know that he was happy with the performances of two of his teammates. One of them had gone scoreless. DePaul had a rough first half, too. It went into its locker room down 13.
But the trainer was pleased. According to federal prosecutors, he was part of a group of bettors who wagered $27,000 on Georgetown taking a lead of 3 or more points going into halftime, and their slips won. But there was no luck involved. The betting syndicate had four DePaul players on its team, prosecutors said, and had arranged for the four players to shave points so Georgetown could cover its first-half spread. In return, the four players received $40,000 the next day.
While DePaul was one of the worst teams in college basketball that season — it went 0-16 in the Big East and won three games all season — prosecutors say its troubles were compounded by the alleged involvement of four players in a widespread college basketball point-shaving scheme that spanned 17 schools and at least 29 Division I basketball games. On Thursday, federal prosecutors unveiled an indictment that rocked college sports, charging 26 men with participating in a conspiracy to bribe and manipulate college basketball games involving then-active college athletes.
The indictment alleged the existence of a gambling ring that pulled in at least 39 players across mostly low and mid-major schools, run by a group of men who, according to the U.S. District Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, used their status and reach inside the basketball community to pull in a slew of co-conspirators.
In a 70-page indictment, prosecutors said that four players helped fix three DePaul games. Other games involved players on Abilene Christian, Alabama State, Buffalo, Coppin State, Eastern Michigan, Fordham, Kennesaw State, La Salle, New Orleans, Nicholls State, North Carolina A&T, Northwestern State, Robert Morris, Saint Louis, Southern Miss and Tulane.
Five of the players charged Thursday have played in college basketball games this season: Kennesaw State’s Simeon Cottle, Eastern Michigan’s Carlos Hart, Delaware State’s Camian Shell, Texas Southern’s Oumar Koureissi and Temple’s Corey “CJ” Hines. Kennesaw State said that Cottle has been suspended from the team, and Texas Southern said that Koureissi has been removed from the team.
Two of the men charged with coordinating the gambling ring — Shane Hennen and Marves Fairley — were also indicted for their alleged involvement in the NBA insider trading scheme brought by the U.S. District Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York, which also charged Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier. Hennen and Fairley face three federal charges, including sports bribery and wire fraud.
Eric Siegle, the attorney for Fairley, had no comment and said he was still reviewing the indictment.
Federal prosecutors also accused Hennen of participating in a rigged poker game ring for which former Portland Trail Blazers head coach and Hall of Famer Chauncey Billups was also indicted. As part of Thursday’s indictment, former NBA player and LSU star Antonio Blakeney was also charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
“This is the corruption of college sports,” said David Metcalf, the U.S. Attorney for Pennsylvania’s Eastern District. “There is a substantial interest, public interest, in the integrity of sports. A great value of American society is a free, fair and level playing field.”
Metcalf said the scheme was far-reaching and involved millions of dollars in wagers. It began in 2022, according to the indictment, when Fairley and Hennen recruited Blakeney, then playing in China for the Jiangsu Dragons for the Chinese Basketball Association, to fix games in that league. Fairley and Hennen asked Blakeney, who had played two seasons in the NBA, to manipulate his performance in some Jiangsu games so that Fairley and Hennen could wager and win on them in the United States. Blakeney, prosecutors say, was paid $200,000 at the end of the season.
Fairley and Hennen allegedly bet $198,300 at a Pennsylvania casino, along with other wagers, on one March 2023 game where Jiangsu was an 11.5-point underdog. Blakeney scored just 11 points in that game during a season in which he averaged more than 32, and his team lost by 31 points. Later that month, prosecutors allege that Blakeney said he would not play in a game on March 15 but that his replacement would take their money to perform and help them. Fairley and Hennen, according to the indictment, bet about $100,000 in total on that game.
The scheme grew profitable enough that Hennen, according to the indictment, texted another person involved that “Nothing gu[a]rantee[d] in this world but death[,] taxes[,] and Chinese basketball.”
The group then moved on to Division I college basketball games in the 2023-24 season. They allegedly built out a network of players that spanned from Texas to New York. Players were induced with payments of anywhere from $10,000 to $30,000 per game, according to the indictment, for their willingness to help the syndicate win their bets on first-half and full game spreads on matchups that often flew under the public radar. Sometimes the players would go and find others to participate as well. Fairley and Hennen then wagered hundreds of thousands of dollars on those games, either themselves or through straw bettors.
In February of 2024, they put about $424,000 down on Kent State to cover an 8.5-point first-half spread against Buffalo. In March of 2024, they bet about $124,000 that Butler would cover a 6.5-point first-half spread against DePaul. Fairley and Hennen would always bet for the favored team to cover because, according to the indictment, they had players on the underdog who would help shave points to help them win.
After a Robert Morris game in February of 2024, when its opponent, Northern Kentucky, had covered the first-half spread as the scheme had hoped, a Robert Morris player texted his contact in the group that he was willing to do it again.
“We might as well do the next one too . . . . [this] was too easy,” Robert Morris forward Markeese Hastings texted, according to the indictment. Hastings allegedly shaved points in two games and was charged with federal counts of sports bribery and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
Hastings was one of 20 players charged by prosecutors, though not all in the same indictment. Some are out of the sport now. Jalen Terry, Da’Sean Nelson and Shawn Fulcher were allegedly involved in the scheme at two different schools, according to prosecutors. Terry and Nelson played for DePaul during the 2023-24 season and then transferred to Eastern Michigan the next season, while Fulcher transferred from Buffalo to Alabama State.
Four were still playing up until the indictment; Cottle scored 21 points for Kennesaw State on Wednesday night and is the team’s leading scorer this season. Other players seemed to participate in the scheme as well, but were not named in the indictment or charged.
“Kennesaw State University is aware of the reports involving men’s basketball student-athlete Simeon Cottle and former student-athlete Demond Robinson,” the school said in a statement on Thursday. “Cottle has been suspended indefinitely from all team activities. KSU has no further public comment at this time.”
Texas Southern said, “Oumar Koureissi arrived at Texas Southern as a promising graduate transfer with the men’s basketball team. Injuries prevented him from seeing significant action. He has been removed from the team. He played one season for Texas Southern. The activity detailed in the allegations occurred prior to any affiliation with Texas Southern University.”
The two other schools with active players charged Wednesday — Delaware State and Eastern Michigan — did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
There were a number of games that the group tried to manipulate so they could win their bets, but in which their efforts failed. Trainer Jalen Smith and Blakeney allegedly tried to pay La Salle players for their involvement in a February 2024 game against St. Bonaventure, where La Salle was a 5.5-point underdog in the first half. La Salle ended up leading by 8 at halftime, and the syndicate lost the roughly $247,000 they bet on the game, according to the indictment.
A few days later, the group allegedly bet $275,000 that South Alabama would outscore Southern Miss by at least 1.5 points, but their game was tied at halftime. They bet on Coppin State to lose by more than 9 points to South Carolina State the next week, but it only lost by 3. The player who had agreed to shave points apologized to Smith after the game, saying that South Carolina State had played too poorly to win by that much.
“[T]hey [South Carolina State] so ass I couldn’t even keep they lead together[,] im sorry for th[a]t bro[,] I try to tell my [Coppin State] teammates to chill and all th[a]t bro[,]” according to a copy of the message in the indictment. “Swear I tried everything in my power second half.”
The indictments are the second set to hit the sports world this basketball season. The ones announced Thursday arrived three months after federal prosecutors in New York charged 34 people after two investigations that ensnared Rozier, Billups and former NBA player Damon Jones. Hennen and Fairley now face federal charges in two districts at the same time. Hennen was also arrested for his alleged role in the 2024 Jontay Porter case that ended with the exiled NBA center pleading guilty to one federal count.
Metcalf said that his office had been in contact with New York’s Eastern District and said they had been cooperating. While he said there is a relationship between all the cases, he believes they are also separate.
“There are defendants in common, but fundamentally, this is a different criminal scheme,” Metcalf said. “If you read the Eastern District of New York indictment, it is fundamentally an insider trading case with a complexion of sports. The individuals in that case were making wagers on insider information — for example, injuries — to make money based on insider information, right? But there is a really important difference between wagering on predicted outcomes, on insider information, and wagering on determined outcomes — outcomes that you control.”
Both cases leave sports reckoning with the imprint of legalized sports gambling. Since the New York indictments, the NBA has implemented changes to its injury reporting rules, is further investigating the claims laid out by federal prosecutors, and is weighing tweaks to other rules to try to guard against future problems. The NCAA is also trying to deal with these new issues.
At the NCAA convention this week in Maryland, during a presentation on legalized gambling’s impact on college sports, Mark Hicks, NCAA managing director of enforcement, described how players mostly at smaller, mid-major schools on teams with losing records were being targeted for game-fixing schemes.
The NCAA has also been pushing for a ban on prop bets in college sports. Its lobbying helped lead four states to remove prop betting on college players, but many others still allow bettors to wager on the performance of individual players.
“Our enforcement team uncovered student-athletes who manipulated their performance to win bets, and we caught coaches trading inside information, and we took action, and we banned those responsible,” Baker said during his address to membership at the convention on Wednesday. “But the sports betting community’s response to that was a shoulder shrug. While sports books announced they’re taking some prop bets off the market for NBA games, because, in their own words, the bets are too risky, they refuse to do the same for college prop bets. In some respects, the sports betting industry’s drive for profits is coming at the expense of our student-athletes, and it must stop.”
Thursday’s federal indictment comes months after the NCAA had announced the results of its own investigations into sports gambling. Over the past year, the NCAA has ruled more than a dozen Division I men’s basketball players permanently ineligible for manipulating game results and their own performances, making impermissible bets, providing information to gamblers and not cooperating with investigations.
“Protecting competition integrity is of the utmost importance for the NCAA,” NCAA President Charlie Baker said in a statement on Thursday. “We are thankful for law enforcement agencies working to detect and combat integrity issues and match manipulation in college sports.”
