Behind the glass doors of an inconspicuous building in Manhattan, in front of a closed printing shop, a dark world was moving, coming to life with the rattle of letters, the muffled clink of glasses and the silent noise of a dangerous secret.
Inside one of the three units of the luxury Kip’s Bay apartment, linked to the Bonanno family, one of New York’s five most notorious Italian-American mafia clans, an illegal poker operation was taking place, according to the United States Attorney’s Office.
The elaborate scheme, masterminded by members of four mafia families in cahoots with famous athletes, defrauded unsuspecting victims of more than $7 million through a cunning scheme, prosecutors said in the indictment.
Last week, 31 people, including Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups and former NBA player Damon Jones of the Cleveland Cavaliers and Miami Heat, were arrested for allegedly participating in a nationwide criminal organization to rig illegal poker games.
A lawyer for Billups denied the allegations. CNN has reached out to Jones’ representatives.
According to the indictment, investigators stated that 13 members and associates of the four mafia families supported the games and received a share of the profits. Members of the illicit poker scheme sometimes threatened and resorted to violence when victims did not pay their debts on time, prosecutors alleged.
FBI Director Kash Patel leads a press conference Thursday to announce arrests related to illegal sports betting and poker games in New York. (Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images)
Days after the arrest, Lexington Avenue was buzzing with normal life. The house where prosecutors say the games took place was silent, with no one entering or leaving for hours. People who woke up late, still in their pajamas, walked their dogs, two men argued over a parking space and neighbors and shopkeepers went about their routines.
True to the spirit of New York, the owner of a convenience store and tobacconist on the corner remained aloof, leaning against the counter, unfazed.
“They don’t impress me. Why, we live in the city. Things like this happen every day,” the owner, who preferred to identify himself as “AK” for security reasons, told CNN. He says that his family in India worked in politics and often had run-ins with their own “Indian mafia”.
“I’ve seen a lot more than what they’re talking about here,” he says. None of the neighbors CNN spoke to said they knew anything, which didn’t surprise him. “They are too rich to be seen that way.”
A woman comes in to pay for a bottle of water and overhears the conversation. She said she had no idea that members of the mob played poker in the building next to hers, as prosecutors allege.
She was shocked for a moment when she found out the news, but then shrugged. “I’m not afraid. What are they going to do to me?”
In the neighborhood, nicknamed “Curry Hill,” dozens of Indian restaurants, grocery stores and vintage stores are clustered along 27th and 28th streets, their doors spreading the fragrant heat of simmering spices into the air.
At Curry in a Hurry, Sajjad Chowdhury serves steaming goat curry in a bowl to a customer while reflecting on the news that the building where investigators say the high-stakes poker games took place is just a block away.
Curry in a Hurry Restaurant, in New York (Alaa Elassar)
“This restaurant has been here for 50 years. There have never been any problems with the mafia, and every restaurant here will say the same,” says Chowdhury. “They live in the shadows. Their presence is not obvious.”
He’s 18 now, but having grown up in New York, he’s absorbed the stories of the city’s darkest decades, when the mob-controlled streets were at their most violent and cruel, and the city lived in fear.
“Now things are different. It doesn’t scare me,” he says.
Outside, the aroma of saffron, cardamom and garam masala mixes with the sweet haze of incense that wafts down the street and masks the underworld accused of hiding just around the corner.
The city may have changed, but its shadows have not, and its oldest secrets still live between the cracks of its neighborhoods.
Welcome to Manhattan’s Secret Poker Games
A mischievous chalk monkey is perched beneath the sign outside Sally’s Bar, taunting passersby: “Having a sh*t day? Have a BEER.”
Inside, sitting on a worn red leather bar stool and holding a beer, Scott Hernandez, a regular at Sally’s, admits that he’s really having a rough day and then dives into his description of the hidden underworld of poker in Manhattan. “These games are everywhere,” he says. “If I wanted to find one today, I could.”
Just yards from where he is drinking, surveillance footage shows two mob members charged in the case regularly passing by Sally’s Bar, just yards from the Lexington Avenue building where the rigged poker games were taking place.
Just steps from where he is drinking, surveillance footage showed two mob members charged in the case regularly frequenting Sally’s Bar, just feet from the Lexington Avenue building where the rigged poker games were taking place. Sally’s itself was not connected to the investigation.
Entry to the games is strictly by invitation or through a friend with connections, he explains. Tables vary in size but rarely have fewer than five players. Hernandez said the stakes are high: For ordinary people, the buy-ins run into the thousands, and for the rich, the price only goes up higher.
The idea that game-fixing victims were attracted to celebrities, in this case supposedly NBA athletes, is common sense to Hernandez.
Billups and Jones were nicknamed “Face Cards,” professional athletes whose mere presence at the rigged games offered star power designed to legitimize the games to “attract victims,” according to an arrest letter written to the judge.
Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups looks on during a game in Boston on March 5. (Maddie Meyer/Getty Images)
For many people, that’s the point of poker, he says.
“It’s a way of being seen. They are nobodies, then they receive an invitation to meet NBA players and feel important. It’s sad,” he says. “It’s about bragging rights, it’s about status. It’s like I’m hanging out with the mob.”
Former Gambino mobster Louis Ferrante also used to play these games, before spending almost nine years in prison for robberies and kidnappings, he tells CNN in a telephone interview from Florida.
“These normal people accidentally fall into a world they don’t belong in,” Ferrante says in a thick, unmistakable New York-Italian accent, each word coming out with a dogged gravity.
“Either they’re fascinated by the mafia and stupid enough to hang out with them, not knowing that at some point they’re going to get their claws into them, or they think, ‘I’m a nobody and people want to hang out with me?’”
Poker games in New York are not a corporate operation, but rather “more like meeting a guy who meets a guy,” says Ferrante, author of The Borgata trilogy. They can be held inside restaurants after closing, in someone’s apartment or in makeshift “casinos,” like the one Ferrante started in the basement of a friend’s deli back in the day.
But regardless of the glamor of the room or the famous faces that adorn the table, Ferrante warns: some men deal with darkness and sitting with them is like walking into a trap that you don’t see until it closes.
“These guys are predators, everyone is prey for them,” he says. “They’re not the kind of people you invite home for lunch.”
The mob never left New York, it just moved upstairs
Today, New York’s streets sparkle with glass towers and boutique cafes. But if we look closely, the mystique and threat of the Mafia still lingers.
Greenwich Village still wears its history like a second skin, every street has the pulse of old New York. Jazz flows from the Blue Note, meeting on the street to mix with the fragrance of espressos and cappuccinos from Caffè Reggio, while men in Washington Square Park walk away through clouds of smoke from their joints.
In the heart of this neighborhood’s restless pulse, a Washington Place apartment linked to the Gambinos housed the same secret poker games, according to the indictment.
The $17 million townhouse, with its polished doors and celebrity past, sits just a few blocks from the walls of the former Triangle Civic Improvement Association social club, the former nerve center of the Genovese family, once under the iron control of Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, but now a tea shop.
Between the 1950s and the 1980s, the streets of New York were invaded by the fierce rule of the Mafia. Extortion and loan sharking were just the surface; Underneath was the brutal application of the law: kneeling in dark alleys, car bombs hurling shrapnel into unsuspecting storefronts, and bodies dumped in rivers or abandoned land to rot as warnings.
View of cars and club tents on Eighth Street at night, looking east from Sixth Avenue in New York’s Greenwich Village on November 18, 1965. (Larry C. Morris/New York Times Co./Getty Images)
But the world has changed. The RICO Act. Telephone tapping. FBI surveillance vans parked in front of Italian bakeries. By the late 1990s, the mob’s influence, along with the arrogance, social clubs and handshakes on Mulberry Street, had waned.
Former undercover FBI agent Joe Cantamessa, who served as a “black bag man” trained to install hidden cameras and microphones in places where suspects lived, worked and met, told CNN that although the Mafia’s grip on New York City has significantly diminished, they have found new ways to stay active.
“Competition in illicit activities is high, and their ability to operate in these other labor extortion rings is a little more complicated,” said Cantamessa.
“Now they get involved in drugs, prostitution, loan sharking, to a certain extent, and gambling continues to be a very ingenious component, when they manage to do it correctly.”
A house in New York’s Greenwich Village neighborhood was linked by prosecutors to the Gambino crime family. (Alaa Elassar/CNN)
Cantamessa, widely recognized as a key figure in dismantling New York’s most powerful organized crime families, said he was surprised by the degree of technological advancement in rigged poker games.
In the rigged games, players inadvertently sat at tables equipped with hidden X-ray cameras that could read face-down cards, while shuffling machines were designed to predict which players had the best hands and alert outside operators, who signaled accomplices through subtle gestures, according to the indictment.
The scheme also involved marked cards, visible only through “specially designed contact lenses or sunglasses,” according to the indictment, and authorities say the defendants also used electronic poker chip trays that controlled the game.
In the early days, the mafia was not just an underworld, it was an infrastructure. They controlled garbage routes, construction sites, clothing factories and even the price of concrete that was poured into the city’s skyscrapers.
But still, like an echo that fades but never completely silences, its presence passes through the alleys like smoke, disappearing before you know where it came from.
