The Deckmate 2 automatic card shufflers used in casinos, cardhouses, and high-end private poker games around the world are designed to shuffle a deck in seconds with perfect, computer-generated randomness, vastly speeding up play. They're also, amazingly, sold with a camera inside that can observe every card in the deck before it's dealt—a fact that's become very convenient for poker-cheating hackers and, allegedly, members of the Cosa Nostra mafia.
On Thursday, the United States Justice Department unsealed an indictment against 31 people, including alleged members of several organized crime families along with two well-known figures in the NBA—Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups and former player and assistant coach Damon Jones—for what prosecutors describe as their roles in a vast rigged-gambling conspiracy. (Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier was charged in a separate alleged gambling scheme, along with Jones and four others.)
The 31 defendants in the first indictment are charged with running a ring of high-stakes private poker games from New York to the Hamptons to Miami, allegedly luring victims with the prospect of playing with NBA stars and then fleecing them for tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars with multiple high-tech cheating systems—among them, hacked card shufflers set up to secretly transmit exactly what cards each player would have in their hand.
According to prosecutors, the marks were taken for more than $7 million dollars over several years of running the rigged gambling schemes. “These individuals used technology and deceit to scam innocent victims out of millions of dollars—eventually funneling money to La Casa Nostra and enriching one of the most notorious criminal networks in the world,” FBI director Kash Patel wrote in a statement.