Winning is typically a good thing for the head coach of the Portland Trail Blazers.

But six years ago, the scammers allegedly using Chauncey Billups as part of a sprawling criminal scheme to lure unsuspecting poker players to rigged tables believed he was winning far too much.

Billups was a “Face Card,” prosecutors said, a high-profile person who could help attract big-fish gamblers to ritzy card games in Manhattan, Las Vegas, Miami and the Hamptons. Billups, aided by equipment like a manipulated shuffling machine and an X-ray table , played on the “Cheating Team.”

In the middle of a game in Vegas in April 2019, the orchestrators of the plot realized they had a problem: Billups was winning too many improbable hands. The streak would surely draw suspicion, they said in text messages in

See Full Page