The lawyer for Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier said Monday he is planning to ask a federal judge to toss the pro baller’s federal bet-rigging case, based on a recent Supreme Court ruling.
Rozier and his longtime pal Deniro Laster both pleaded not guilty to wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy in a Brooklyn Federal Court arraignment. The two were released on $3 million and $50,000 bond, respectively.
Both men were indicted in October in a sweeping sports-betting takedown that snared Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups and former Cleveland Cavaliers player and coach Damon Jones.
In a second hearing a couple of hours later, Rozier’s lawyer James Trusty, said he’s finalizing a motion to dismiss the charge based on a 2023 Supreme Court decision in a wire fraud case. The high court ruled that the wire fraud law only covers scams involving “tangible” property, not intangibles like economic information.
Rozier and Jones are accused of leaking insider information to betters in a scheme tied to former Toronto Raptors forward Jontay Porter — who pleaded guilty in a game-rigging conspiracy last year.
The duo has been linked to bet-rigging in seven pro games in 2023 and 2024 — including one Charlotte Hornets game on March 23, 2023, when Rozier let Laster know he’d be leaving the game early because of a purported injury.
Laster and his accomplices then used that info to either place or steer more than $200,000 in bets, prosecutors allege.
“We’re excited about litigating a legal motion about legal innocence, and we still have factual innocence to deal with,” Trusty told a hallway full of reporters — as Rozier slipped away and headed toward an elevator.
Billups is not charged or named in the indictment, though he’s referenced in the case as an unindicted co-conspirator who let one of the defendants know the Trail Blazers were going to tank a game to increase their odds of getting a better draft pick, according to law enforcement sources.
Billups and Jones are also charged in a second indictment, alongside 29 other defendants, of taking part in rigged, mob-tied underground poker games. The feds stay that they played in high-stakes poker games in Manhattan, Las Vegas, the Hamptons and Miami, to lure in starstruck, deep-pocketed gamblers.
The conspirators used high-tech cheating equipment like an altered automatic card shuffler that fed card data to an off-site operator, an X-ray table, and a poker chip tray with hidden cameras to rig the games so that the victims lost massive amounts of cash, the feds say.
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