🌊 The National Betting Association

This investigation into betting is brought to you by… FanDuel.

In case you haven’t heard — get ready for tomorrow’s deep dive on the topic — a massive NBA scandal broke yesterday involving the mafia, x-ray poker tables, LeBron James, and so much more. It’s one of the most fascinating stories we’ve covered to date, and we dip your toes into it with today’s lead story. Our favorite part was watching ESPN’s roundtable discussion on how gambling has compromised the integrity of sports, with an ESPN Bet “bet $10 and get $100 free!” banner flashing at the bottom. The producer deleted it mid-segment — a heroic move that we hope makes it into SportsCenter’s Top 10 plays.

Now if anyone would like to make a wager on a line of 1.5 typos in today’s newsletter, go ahead and email us at [email protected]. (Rocco, if you’re reading this, we promise we’ll get you the money).

–Max and Max

KEY STORY

NBA Figures Arrested in Gambling Probe

Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups and Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier were among 34 people arrested in federal gambling investigations

• Billups was charged with participating in rigged poker games allegedly backed by organized crime families. The operation used former athletes to lure unsuspecting players into games that used sophisticated cheating technology, stealing more than $7M from victims

• Rozier was accused of sharing insider information with bettors from 2022 to 2024, including when players would sit out games or leave early due to injuries

• Both face charges, including wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy

Dig Deeper

• The poker scheme allegedly used altered card shuffling machines, hidden cameras, and special equipment that could reveal other players' cards. Victims were then subjected to extortion and violence to collect gambling debts

• The arrests deepened a crisis for the NBA that began in 2024, when Toronto Raptors player Jontay Porter was banned for life for conspiring with gamblers to manipulate his performance

• NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said the league has been working with sportsbook partners to combat manipulation attempts, including pulling back some bets on lesser-known players where performance is easier to manipulate

KEY STORY

US Officials Condemn Israel Annexation Vote

US officials criticized a vote by Israel’s extreme right in favor of annexing the West Bank

• VP JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are visiting Israel this week. Amid this, 25 hard-right Israeli lawmakers (of 120 total) voted to annex the West Bank, a mostly symbolic decision that caused anger in the US

• Vance called the vote “a very stupid political stunt,” to which he personally took “some insult”; Rubio said the vote was “threatening” to the peace deal

• Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – whose Likud party did not vote for the bill – called it a “very stupid political stunt” and said the bill was “unlikely to go anywhere”

Dig Deeper

• The vote comes as US officials assure the Arab world that they will not let Israel annex the West Bank, which could inflame tensions across the region

• In a recent interview with Time magazine, Trump said, "I gave my word to the Arab countries" that Israel would not annex the West Bank. "Israel would lose all of its support from the United States if that happened," he added

KEY STORY

Trump Pardons Binance Founder

President Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the founder of Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange platform

• Zhao pleaded guilty in 2023 to violating US money laundering laws after failing to implement adequate safeguards at Binance. Between 2018 and 2022, Binance processed at least 1.1M transactions that violated US sanctions, worth approximately $898M. Zhao was sentenced to four months in prison in April 2024 and paid a $50M fine

• On Thursday, the White House announced Trump had pardoned Zhao. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Zhao's prosecution was part of a "war on cryptocurrency" and claimed there were "no allegations of fraud or identifiable victim"

Dig Deeper

• Binance contacted Trump allies last year with a business deal as part of a plan to return to the US market. The Trump family has discussed buying part of Binance's US operations

• The Trump family's crypto company, World Liberty Financial, has made more money in the past year than their real estate business has ever made in a single year. Binance has helped grow World Liberty's digital dollar, called USD1, and earlier this year helped arrange a major deal when an outside investor spent $2B using USD1

• The cryptocurrency Binance Coin jumped as much as 8% on news of the pardon. Zhao was worth $54.5B at the time of the pardon

KEY STORY

Reddit Sues AI Companies Over Data Scraping

Reddit filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI and three other companies for allegedly stealing user data through unauthorized scraping operations

• Reddit possesses valuable user conversation data that AI companies need to train their chatbots. The platform has licensed its data to companies like OpenAI and Google through formal agreements, but other firms have reportedly obtained Reddit content without permission

• On Wednesday, Reddit filed a lawsuit naming Perplexity AI and three data scraping firms: Lithuanian company Oxylabs, Russian company AWMProxy, and Texas-based SerpApi. Reddit alleged that the scraping companies collected Reddit data by extracting it from Google search results, then packaged and resold that information to AI companies

Dig Deeper 

• Ben Lee, Reddit's chief legal officer, said in a statement that AI companies are engaged in an “arms race for quality human content" that has created an “industrial-scale ‘data laundering’ economy.” He added that Reddit is a prime target because it represents “one of the largest and most dynamic collections of human conversation ever created”

• Perplexity stated it would “fight vigorously for users’ rights to freely and fairly access public knowledge” and called the lawsuit a “show of force” in Reddit's data negotiations with other companies

QUOTE OF THE DAY

RUNDOWN
Some Quick Stories for the Office

🇺🇸 New York City Mayor Eric Adams endorsed former Governor Andrew Cuomo in the mayoral race on Thursday, setting aside their previous animosity to oppose Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani.

🎟️ New Kent Commonwealth's Attorney Scott Renick has recused himself from investigating how Democratic Attorney General candidate Jay Jones' 2022 speeding ticket case was handled, citing a potential conflict of interest.

💂 President Trump paused plans to deploy federal agents – potentially including National Guard troops and Customs and Border Protection officers – to San Francisco after conversations with Mayor Daniel Lurie (D) and Silicon Valley leaders, including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. 

🪖 Senate Democrats blocked a Republican bill to pay military troops and some federal workers during the government shutdown, with the measure failing 54-45 on Thursday, arguing the bill gave President Trump too much authority.

🤑 A London tribunal ruled Apple abused its dominant position by charging app developers unfair commissions, potentially costing the tech company hundreds of millions of pounds in damages.

What does Roca Nation think?

🎥 Yesterday’s Question: What’s a classic/critically acclaimed movie that you think is totally overrated? The hotter the take the better!

20 Questions!

Ladies and gentlemen, the Weeknd.

Roca Nation, this week we're bringing back the classic edition of 20 Questions. The origin of 20 Questions was to ask 20 super random questions for you to answer at your desk, in the coffee line, on the couch, or even on the toil- nevermind. So here we go... hope you enjoy!

Link to 20 Questions!

Last Week’s Responses

Average responses to last week’s “This or That” Roadtrip Edition.

Joe Rogan - 59.6% Mark Cuban - 40.4%
Disney adult - 26.6% college kid who just got back from a life-changing trip in Vietnam - 73.4%
Christian Bale - 62.0% Kid Rock - 38.0%
Taylor Swift - 74.4% Nikki Minaj - 25.6%
Zohran - 20.6% Cuomo - 10.9% I'm walking - 68.5%
9/11 truther - 55.9% guy who always lectures casual acquaintances about how important it is to vote - 44.1%
Chris Rock - 71.1% LeBron James - 28.9%
Urban Meyer - 22.4% Flo from Progressive - 77.6%
Thomas Jefferson - 68.7% Babe Ruth - 31.3%
Steve Irwin - 52.3% Johnny Cash - 47.7%
Sydney Sweeney - 34.4% Rosa Parks - 65.6%
The Rock - 54.2% Ed Sheeran - 45.8%
Paul McCartney - 52.0% Billy Joel - 48.0%
Kim Jong-Un - 58.2% Joy Behar - 41.8%
Emma Watson - 38.7% DNA Watson - 61.3%
Aaron Rodgers - 29.5% Jim Carrey - 70.5%
Bill Belichick's girlfriend - 31.9% Prince Harry - 68.1%
Ted Cruz - 54.0% Woody Allen - 46.0%
AOC - 32.9% Jon Taffer from Bar Rescue - 67.1%
George Washington - 57.7% Socrates - 42.3%

POPCORN
Some Quick Stories for Happy Hour

🐘 Herd Immunity: Veterinary immunologists have developed a vaccine for elephant endotheliotropic herpesvirus (EEHV), one of the leading killers of elephants in captivity and the wild.

💎 Diamond in the Rough: An Indiana man visiting Arkansas’ Crater of Diamonds State Park unearthed a 2.71-carat white diamond on his second trip to the site during a cross-country road trip.

🐷 Board to Be Wild: A pig from Illinois earned a Guinness World Record for the fastest 10 meters pushing a skateboard by a pig, completing the 33-foot distance in just 11.32 seconds.

🧑‍💻 Meta-static Shock: An entrepreneur’s AI startup has extended open hiring invitations to the 600 Meta employees laid off from the company's AI division, offering base salaries between $200,000 and $600,000 plus equity.

⚖️ Speed Dial-vorce: A Turkish court ordered a man to pay his ex-wife compensation for material and moral damages after she discovered he had saved her contact in his phone as “Tombek,” which translates to “Chubby.”

ROCA WRAP
Poet of the Dispossessed

Charles Bukowski
This writer’s gravestone bears just two words of advice: “Don't Try.”

Heinrich Charles Bukowski was born in Germany under foreign control. American soldiers occupied the Rhineland after Germany's defeat in World War I, and his father was among them. His father – Heinrich Bukowski – had an affair with Katharina Fett, a local woman, and the two married one month before Charles Bukowski’s birth. Heinrich became a building contractor, hoping to profit from postwar reconstruction, but Germany's crushing reparations payments created economic catastrophe. Hyperinflation destroyed savings, unemployment soared, and the family struggled. After two years trying to make it work, Heinrich gave up on his homeland and decided to emigrate.

On April 18, 1923, when young Bukowski was just two years old, the family sailed from Bremerhaven to Baltimore. They settled in Los Angeles, but Germany followed them like a shadow. Bukowski spoke English with a thick German accent as a boy, and neighborhood children mocked him relentlessly, calling him “Heini” – the German diminutive of Heinrich. They ridiculed his accent and the clothing his German parents made him wear. His father, frustrated by unemployment during the Great Depression and unable to replicate his life in Germany, became violently abusive. Bukowski later told interviewers his father beat him with a razor strop three times weekly from ages six to eleven.

His German birth nearly destroyed him. On July 22, 1944, with America at war with Nazi Germany, FBI agents arrested the 23-year-old Bukowski in Philadelphia on suspicion of draft evasion. He spent seventeen days in Philadelphia's Moyamensing Prison before being released. Shortly after, he failed a psychological examination during his military entrance physical and received a 4-F classification: Unfit for military service. 

Bukowski spent the next decades drifting through America's underbelly – cheap rooming houses, menial jobs, and a "ten-year drunk" that nearly killed him. He eventually landed at the Los Angeles Post Office, working as a letter filing clerk while writing raw, unfiltered poetry about drinking, gambling, and working-class desperation. In 1969, at age 49, a publisher offered him $100 monthly to quit and write full-time. He accepted, and became famous for his brutally honest accounts of American failure and survival.

Bukowski returned to Germany in May 1978, when he was 57 years old. He gave a live poetry reading in Hamburg, performing before an audience in the country he'd left 55 years earlier. By then, he'd transformed his traumatic German childhood into art, using the undeserved pain to fuel his writing. When he died in 1994 in California, his gravestone bore just two words: "Don't Try."

For a man born in defeated, occupied Germany who became America's poet of the dispossessed, perhaps not trying to belong to any country was the only way to survive.

EDITOR’S NOTE
Final Thoughts

The first of our three-episode Greater Minneapolis series is now live. For this one, we explored the city’s Somali neighborhood, which has become a flashpoint in the social media culture wars. We went past the clickbait and culture wars and tried to show it for what it is. We think you’ll find this episode worth your time.

Hope you all have an amazing weekend, and don’t forget to do 20 Questions!

–Max and Max