It was early spring 2024, and at an overlit food court in an Atlantic City casino called Resorts, a group of poker dealers was holed up at a table cluttered with baskets of chicken fingers and fries. Tim McCormack was both a trusted New York City dealer and a gambler; he’d worked in backroom games since he was a teenager in Brooklyn. He’d come down earlier that day with fellow dealers Ammar Awawdeh and Long Phi “Bruce” Pham. Like McCormack, Pham gambled, but Awawdeh was on another level, “the most degenerate gambler of our day,” McCormack said; he ran some of the city’s biggest games and wasn’t afraid of losing money. Mahmud Mollah, a friend of Awawdeh’s, had driven in separately from Pennsylvania to meet them. They were there to place a bet that the four of them had been working on for months, one they already knew would hit. At the table, Mollah took a selfie of the group and pressed send.

The recipient was in the Toronto Raptors locker room getting ready to play the Sacramento Kings. Jontay Porter had been one of the top-ranked high-school recruits in the country, but injuries had derailed his college career. He went undrafted and bounced through the G League; by the time he landed with the Toronto Raptors, he was just another replaceable roster piece. He was also a gambling addict, and that March, he was in debt to Awawdeh. The repayment plan had taken shape over the course of the spring. It was simple: Porter would say he was sick and remove himself early from the Kings game. McCormack and Mollah would bet on this outcome on DraftKings. The group would share the profits: Porter, Pham, Awawdeh, and Mollah would each receive 24 percent; the remaining 4 percent would go to McCormack.

As the game started, McCormack placed his bet: $8,000 that Porter would fall short of his rebound line. It was modest compared to Mollah’s, an audacious $80,000 six-leg parlay, betting the under on his rebounds, three-pointers, steals, blocks, assists, and total points. If everything went as planned, it would all amount to a roughly $1.2 million payout. They sat at the table to watch as the game began. Within his first minute of play, Porter made two rebounds. The ball came right to him. “I was shook,” McCormack said. He worried that Porter couldn’t help but get more rebounds. But then he missed a shot, and the quarter ended. When the second quarter started, he wasn’t on the court. He claimed he was ill and sat out the rest of the game.

At first, there was a celebration among the gamblers, but as they waited for the game to end so they could cash out their bets, paranoia set in. Maybe their plan worked too well. “I got nervous,” McCormack said. Still, when the final buzzer sounded, he went to the cage. To his relief, the bet cleared immediately: $44,000 in cash.

Moments later, Mollah attempted to withdraw his $1.12 million in winnings only to be told the bet was under review. The cash was frozen. The energy in the room shifted. They tried to rationalize. “We just figured it was so much money that it was normal to take a minute to clear. I got paid, so I just wasn’t worried,” McCormack said.

Optimistic that the million was coming later, Awawdeh, McCormack, and Pham decided to go play their partial winnings on blackjack. Within 20 minutes, the only money they had touched, the $44,000, was already back in the system. “I went home with nothing,” McCormack said.

A few weeks later, McCormack woke up to the sound of the buzzer ringing in his apartment near Tompkins Square Park. Assuming it was his wife locked out while walking the dog, he stumbled toward the door and opened it to find agents in FBI vests. They handed him a warrant for access to his phone. When McCormack read it — “target of a federal investigation” — he understood. The agents pointed his phone at his face to unlock it. From there, everything moved fast. The Feds already had the messages among the five men, the selfie, transaction logs. Everything was time-stamped. Clean. Digital. Enough to build the entire story without anyone saying much at all. Pham, McCormack would learn later, had booked a one-way ticket to Australia; federal agents managed to stop him at the airport. Awawdeh had surrendered. By June, they were all arraigned and charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

For most of McCormack’s career as a poker dealer, gambling in New York existed in the shadows — basements, second floors above storefronts. It was illegal, but it was contained. You had to know someone. You had to be invited in. There were barriers. Since New York’s legalization of online sports betting in 2022, though, the system is no longer hidden: It’s promoted. The odds are built into the broadcast. The lines scroll across the screen before NBA games like weather reports.

On popular online sportsbooks like DraftKings and FanDuel, people now bet not just on a game’s outcome but on its minutiae: The color of the Gatorade spilled on the coach will be orange; a certain player will go under his projected number of rebounds. For gamblers who happen to be athletes — and there are many in a country where 52 percent of men between 18 and 49 have an active sports-betting account — manipulating the game can seem like a simple way to make money or erase debt. And for a bettor, it has never been easier to track down a morally flexible athlete. In September, the NCAA banned two Fresno State and one San Jose State men’s basketball players after they “bet on their own games, one another’s games, and/or provided information that enabled others to do so,” per the organization. “Two of the student-athletes then manipulated their performances to ensure that certain bets were won.” Two months later, a pair of Cleveland Guardians pitchers were indicted after allegedly agreeing to throw balls instead of strikes. (They have pleaded not guilty.) In late April, former NBA player Damon Jones pleaded guilty to engaging in two mob-linked gambling schemes; he admitted to a judge that he’d given insider information to gamblers. The sportsbooks have fought back against this kind of fraud, investing in surveillance to detect unusual betting patterns.

But they also spend on perks to lure bettors back in for more, promising frequent users courtside seats, suites, gifts, cruises to the Bahamas. By the time of his arrest, McCormack had reached “Onyx tier” on DraftKings, the app’s highest-possible rewards level. He was betting constantly, he said. “Lithuanian volleyball. Korean baseball. Darts. Rugby. Ping-Pong. Cricket. There’s always a game being played somewhere. I’d wake up in the middle of the night to take a piss, check lines in leagues I’d never heard of, bet $7,000 on Korean baseball, flush the toilet, and on my way back to bed, I’d bet on the fatter dart player. Just because he looked like he sat in a bar all day and played darts. Like, That’s my guy.” Then he’d go back to sleep. Like Porter, McCormack was an addict, and it was in this state of mind that he decided to go to Atlantic City and make the bet that would finally send him to prison.

McCormack’s gambling addiction began in his family living room in Brooklyn. “My mom bought me a poker table for Christmas,” McCormack told me. “Shuffler and everything.” It was the early aughts, and Chris Moneymaker had just turned Texas Hold’em into an American fever dream on ESPN; suburban living rooms all over the country were pretending to be casinos. In the McCormack house, the game started small: he and a few friends, $20 buy-ins, cards on the table, kids playing poker until the sun came up.

The family is religious. His father, from Cavan, Ireland, had once been a Catholic brother. His mother was a sister from Flatbush. They met while studying at St. Francis College, left their religious orders with dispensation from the Catholic Church, and built a life in Brooklyn that ran on discipline, ritual, and faith. They had seven children. Later came 15 grandchildren. A tight-knit family, they lived in a large aging Victorian house in Ditmas Park. At one point, the boys slept two to a room in bunk beds, just like in barracks. Grandparents downstairs, kids and parents upstairs.

McCormack, the baby of the family, was an altar boy and sang in the choir. He worked the rectory door at the church at night, answering phones and letting people in. He played basketball and baseball. His mother, Maureen, described him as “a very good, nice kid.” She was his first-grade teacher at........

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