The fix was in at three consecutive DePaul men’s basketball home games late in the 2023-24 season — the worst in school history — according to a bombshell federal indictment unsealed Thursday in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
The indictment covered a widespread betting scheme to rig NCAA and Chinese Basketball Association games and ensnared 26 people, including three former DePaul players — Jalen Terry, Da’Sean Nelson and Micawber “Mac” Etienne — as well as former Bulls player Antonio Blakeney, federal prosecutors said.
The timeline laid out in the 70-page indictment begins in September 2022, with “fixers working to recruit and bribe” in the Chinese league, in which Blakeney, who last played for the Bulls in 2019, was a top scorer. In one game Blakeney is accused of throwing, he scored 21 points below his average as his team, the Jiangsu Dragons, lost by 31.
Blakeney, 29, also is accused of recruiting and bribing Division-I college players including DePaul’s Etienne to participate in point shaving. For his role in the scheme, Blakeney received a one-time payment of $200,000 delivered to a storage unit he had in Florida, prosecutors said.
Blakeney played in 76 NBA games, all with the Bulls, from 2017 to 2019. The Bulls declined to comment.
Fixers homed in on college basketball during the 2023-24 and 2024-25 seasons, involving more than 39 players on more than 17 Division I teams and more than 29 games, according to the indictment. The fixers wagered millions of dollars and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to players, with payments to players typically ranging from $10,000 to $30,000 per game.
Players also helped fix games by recruiting other players, authorities said. One such player named was Etienne, who is said to have been bribed in February 2024 and to have enlisted Terry, Nelson and an unnamed person. The Blue Demons were most of the way through a 3-29 season that included an 0-20 record in the Big East — the low point in a miserable two-decade stretch in the power conference — and saw coach Tony Stubblefield fired in January.
It’s possible having no permanent coach, a relatively tiny supply of NIL money and a murky-at-best future for players in the program made DePaul a target.
Athletic director DeWayne Peevy, who was hired in 2020, declined to comment beyond a statement released by the school. Stubblefield, now an assistant at Oregon, didn’t respond to a text or an interview request made through his current school.
The DePaul players named in the indictment were gone before the 2024-25 season, Chris Holtmann’s first as coach. No current players were on the 2023-24 team, which was led toward the end by interim coach Matt Brady, now an assistant at Boston University.
“DePaul University is deeply disappointed that former student-athletes were named in the indictment,” the statement read.
“The university has a longstanding commitment to educating our athletics community about the dangers and consequences of sports gambling. … We will continue to evaluate and strengthen our education, monitoring, and compliance efforts to protect the integrity of competition and the well-being of our student-athletes. The university will cooperate fully with any investigation.”
In late February 2024, the first half of DePaul’s game against Georgetown at Wintrust Arena was fixed, according to the indictment. The Hoyas were favored by 2½ points in the first half and went into the break leading 41-28. Terry scored zero points in the first half but poured in 16 in the second half of the Blue Demons’ 77-76 loss. Terry, Nelson, Etienne and a fourth person are accused of receiving a $40,000 bribe for their roles in that game.
In the next home game, against Butler, fixers again bet against the Blue Demons in the first half. The spread for that half was 6½ and Butler led comfortably at 45-27 at the intermission. The Blue Demons outscored the Bulldogs in the second half of another loss.
Next came St. John’s at Wintrust and another first-half bet against the home team. The first-half spread was 15 and the score this time was 54-28. The difference in the second half was just one point. According to the indictment, Etienne, primarily a bench player, received and replied to a text from one of the fixers during this game.
Soon after, another $40,000 payment was delivered to the accused conspirators from DePaul.
Terry — a former four-star recruit who began his career at Oregon — and Nelson were teammates last season at Eastern Michigan, where they were the second- and fourth-leading scorers, respectively, in the Mid-American Conference. Etienne played last season at La Salle.
Concerns about gambling and college sports have grown since 2018, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on the practice, leading some states to legalize it to varying degrees. The NCAA does not allow athletes or staff to bet on college games, but it briefly allowed student-athletes to bet on professional sports last year before rescinding that decision in November.
One betting scandal after another has rocked the sports world, where gambling revenue topped $11 billion for the first three-quarters of last year, according to the American Gaming Association. That’s up more than 13% from the prior year, the group said.
The indictment follows a series of NCAA investigations that led to at least 10 players receiving lifetime bans this year for bets that sometimes involved their own teams and their own performances. And the NCAA has said that at least 30 players have been investigated over gambling allegations. More than 30 people were also charged in last year’s sprawling federal takedown of illegal gambling operations linked to professional basketball.
Contributing: Joe Cowley and USA Today Sports
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