Game Over

Of the many things happening on the court at Scotiabank Arena on March 20, 2024, among the least interesting was whatever Raptors power forward Jontay Porter was doing. A journeyman bench player, Porter was somehow both physically massive—a six-foot-eleven tangle of limbs—and wholly forgettable. His stat line for the year was 4.5 points, 3.2 rebounds and 2.17 assists per game. On the court, he wasn’t much of a force: a half-step slow to the play, middling on defence, unambitious on offence. He was easy to overlook, especially when he was on the court with Scottie Barnes, the dynamic young Raptors forward, and facing off against LA Clippers superstar Kawhi Leonard, as he was that day. When the second quarter began and Porter stayed rooted to the bench, few noticed or cared. The truth—an elastic term, it turns out, when it comes to Porter—was that he’d gone to his coach complaining of indigestion and had been instructed to sit out the rest of the game.

Related: Scottie Barnes is the new face of the Raptors—and the team’s best chance of salvation

Elsewhere, however, the benching of a bench player was of extreme importance. Deep in the nerve centres of FanDuel and DraftKings, the two biggest sports betting companies in the US, red flags were being raised. Unusually large bets had been placed on Porter’s performance that day, counting on him to underperform relative to his averages in just about every metric: shots, blocks, assists, rebounds. And now, with Porter leaving the game early, all of those bets were paying out. Algorithmically, it made no sense. Hundreds of thousands of prop bets, as they’re called, are placed every day across Canada and around the world. These are “propositions” about essentially anything: the duration of the “freeeeee” in the American national anthem, whether it will bring a player to tears, which team Drake will root for. But rarely do people bet on the actions of a pine-riding role player—let alone stake five figures on one. Something was up. Soon, the entire sports betting industry, plus the NBA and the FBI, would be united in a common cause to find out what.

When Jontay Porter joined the Raptors in 2023, he had a whiff of star quality, but it had more to do with his older brother’s reputation than his own. As the starting small forward for the Denver Nuggets, Michael Porter Jr. had helped the team win the NBA championship just nine months earlier. This family connection gave Jontay some buzz, as did frequent comparisons to Marc Gasol, the six-foot-eleven Spanish centre who played for the Raptors during their championship run. The Raptors had invested in Jontay’s genetics, hoping that, given the right opportunity, he might eventually find his stride. But, despite his college reputation as a solid all-rounder, Jontay struggled to reach the lofty heights so many had predicted.

Jontay had dealt with the pressure of sky-high athletic expectations almost from birth. The Porter family was built on two pillars: Christianity and basketball. Jontay’s mother, Lisa, had dominated the University of Iowa women’s team, scoring more than 1,300 points over four seasons. His father, Michael Sr., was a touring Christian hip hop artist turned professional college basketball coach. The couple met through Athletes in Action, a league that combined Christianity and sporting excellence, and married in 1993. They went on to have eight children. Jontay, born in 1999, was the fourth, arriving just 16 months after Michael Jr.

Related: Inside the Markham casino fiasco

Up until the age of 10 or 11, Jontay and Michael Jr. could expect to be awoken by their father at 5 a.m. and taken to a training facility that was often left open after hours. According to a 2019 profile in the Ringer, Michael Jr. loved the practices; Jontay did not. On the blessed mornings they arrived to find the doors locked, the younger brother would secretly celebrate a chance to go back to bed. Even then, the Porter kids grew up with a strict daily regimen. Lisa homeschooled them until at least Grade 8. Jontay, who read the Bible in bed, poring over Paul’s letters and the apocalyptic visions of Revelation, picked up old-school values. Even after he moved out, he refused to curse, using “golly” or “fudge” instead.

He may not have loved their shared morning outings, but he did love Michael Jr., who was both his best friend and his bitter rival. During one high school scrimmage, Jontay matched up against his brother, who was lurking near the baseline, protecting the rim. Already six-foot-nine, he leapt over Michael Jr. and landed a spectacular dunk. Enraged, the elder brother ran Jontay down and hurled the ball at him. After that, the two avoided guarding each other or playing one-on-one. They were simply too competitive. Besides, it wasn’t in Jontay’s nature to fight. He was a gentle giant, known to apologize to opponents if he ran into them too hard.

He was bolder off the court, where he had developed a taste for business. In Grade 7, he learned how to fix iPhone screens on YouTube. He’d buy new screens for $30 apiece and charge other kids $100 to repair their devices. In high school, he invested $5,000 in Bitcoin on the advice of another YouTuber. It eventually yielded $12,000 in profit, enough to buy an iMac and a car.

In 2016, Michael Sr. was offered the job of assistant coach at the University of Washington, and the family moved to Seattle. At school, Jontay and Michael Jr. were coached by retired NBA All-Star Brandon Roy. The brothers went to class for a week before discovering that attendance wasn’t required to play on the team. They immediately returned to homeschooling, where they could leave early to hit the gym. Meanwhile, Jontay began making a name for himself on the court, averaging 14.3 points and 13.6 rebounds per game. He and Michael Jr. landed athletic scholarships to the University of Missouri, where their family was already an institution: Jontay’s older sisters, Cierra and Bri, played for the women’s basketball team. “We’re a basketball family,” said Michael Jr. at the time. “That’s just what we do.”

As a Missouri Tiger, Jontay was inconsistent, but his good days were enough to garner him some buzz. He became a sought-after NBA prospect, with ESPN ranking him 11th among draft hopefuls for that year. After announcing his intention to enter the NBA draft alongside Michael Jr., Jontay decided to do a sophomore season with the Tigers to push his stock even higher. He pulled out of the draft on the May 30 deadline. Five months later, in a game against Southern Illinois, he found himself entangled with a defender, and he pushed hard off his right leg to get away. His knee gave in, and he collapsed. Jontay cried when he received the diagnosis: a torn ACL.

Related: “I’m not about yelling. I don’t believe in that kind of leadership”—A Q&A with Raptors coach Darko Rajakovic

After Michael Jr. joined the Nuggets, Jontay moved into a high-rise apartment with him in downtown Denver. He was about to be cleared to start playing again, but a snowstorm delayed his appointment by a week. One night at the gym, ­Jontay watched Michael Jr. toss the ball around with a friend. Unable to resist, he joined in. As the brothers played off each other, the game got heated, and Jontay heard a nauseating pop in his knee. They stopped instantly, and Michael Jr. started screaming, “Why would you play!?” Jontay punched a wall.

He’d torn his ACL again. “The first was a freak accident,” he told a reporter. “The second one was an idiotic mistake.” It took him seven weeks to get off crutches. At the time, he called his recovery the most depressing period of his life. He spent his now-ample free time moping around coffee shops, journalling and reading C. S. Lewis. Without the adrenalin rush of basketball, he turned his attention to his crypto­currency investments, which he’d kept up since his big win in high school.

One day, as Jontay was recovering, he and Michael Jr. were walking the concourse at a Missouri basketball game. A fan recognized Jontay and asked when he’d be playing again. “I’m not playing anymore,” he responded. Michael Jr. went quiet. Out of the fan’s sight, he gave his brother a steely look. “Stop saying that, Tay,” he said. “You’re gonna play again.” By this point, Michael Jr. had already been through two agonizing back surgeries and had returned to the NBA both times. If he could go through that, he told his brother, Jontay could get over his second ACL tear. The next day, Jontay was back in the gym.

After being passed over in the 2019 draft, he finally entered the NBA in 2020 as a free agent on a $6-million contract with the Memphis Grizzlies. He’d soon marry Kelli Kingma, a basketball player at Washington State. Wedding photos show the two kissing in a golf cart atop a hill, en route to their country club ceremony. “It’s quite the comeback story,” Jontay would later tell reporters. “Hopefully it has a happy ending.”

Now that he had a substantial income, Porter was keen to multiply it. In September of 2020, he started up a Twitter account, @TayTrades11, dedicated to sharing crypto trading tips. He also co-founded a swing trading advice service called the Financial Cloud. His cryptocurrency interest was blossoming into a wider fascination with day trading. Companies like Wealthsimple and Robinhood had created apps where users could quickly and easily buy and sell stocks. Day trading was increasingly treated as a form of legalized gambling, with forums like Reddit’s Wall Street Bets glorifying volatile investments. Porter had been experimenting with these for a while: in college, he had opened a Robinhood account and invested in Apple ahead of a new product launch, turning $2,000 into $10,000. He put that into smart TV maker Roku, which grew his portfolio to $32,000—before it dropped down to zero. “I lost my entire position,” he said on the podcast Bound to Be Rich in 2021. “I vowed never to trade again.” But he did, losing his principal four more times before his luck turned.

To Porter’s mind, he’d been training for these precipitous ups and downs his entire life. The Bible preached perseverance, and in many ways he’d embodied it, twice overcoming injury. Having the nerve to hold a stock position was, by contrast, easy. When, in December of 2020, his $50,000 investment in electric car makers Tesla and Neo shot up to $200,000 in three days, Porter came away with a new, if perilous, confidence: success in day trading required a certain gunslinger attitude. He had to care less. “I started looking at money in my trading account like it was a video game,” he said on Bound to Be Rich. “I don’t panic too much if I lose some. It’s just numbers on a screen.” Porter hardly needed the extra income. But, as any gambler knows, the risk is more intoxicating than the reward. Each new coin or stock carried the thrill of a potential win. All he had to do was place the right bet.

Meanwhile, a new fad was growing in mainstream popularity, one perfectly tailored to a young man interested in both basketball and day trading: sports betting. It was banned by federal law in the US, but fantasy sports were exempt. Bettors would assemble a fictional roster of real players, and if, in the real world, they accumulated points, rebounds or assists, the fictional team would gain points. Win your league and you win real money. Over the 2010s, fantasy sports became a booming business: by 2017, more than 59 million people in the US and Canada were managing their own imaginary teams. Two companies came to dominate the industry: FanDuel and DraftKings, which now account for 80 per cent of the daily fantasy market in the US. Their back-end systems, which tracked the minutiae of every game and analyzed them for odds, would have been perfectly suited for non-fantasy betting—if only it were legal.

At first, the NBA was dead set against the idea. The league worried that legalized betting would undermine public trust in the sport. When New Jersey attempted to legalize sports betting in 2012, the NBA joined the NFL, NHL and MLB in a suit against the state. But soon the allure of potential profits became too much to resist. Why let third parties make a fortune off their sport when they could secure their own piece of the pie? In 2014, the NBA struck a strategic partnership with FanDuel and acquired an equity stake in the company. Just days after the deal closed, the league’s commissioner, Adam Silver, published an op-ed in the New York Times. “There is an obvious appetite among sports fans for a safe and legal way to wager on professional sporting events,” he wrote. In 2018, the US Supreme Court struck down the law prohibiting sports betting. Suddenly, betting on players was not only above board but fully endorsed by the NBA.

Related: “They take away from the entire game”—Karl Subban on his campaign to ban sports betting ads

Fantasy leagues turned out to be the perfect gateway drug. What had begun as self-administered betting pools among friends exploded into a multibillion-dollar industry, with the hegemons of the fantasy world, FanDuel and DraftKings, swiftly dividing up the spoils. They invested massively in advertising, plastering stadiums, courts and rinks with their logos and forming partnerships with broadcasters to create branded content ­starring trusted sports journalists. Casinos, too, got on board, creating dedicated sports betting zones with walls of screens, bars, and 24/7 kiosks to deposit cash and take out winnings.

Fearful of losing out, the Canadian government passed Bill C-218 in 2021, which legalized single-event sports betting. Most provinces ran betting through their public lottery corporations, but Ontario went further, allowing private companies to offer regulated online casinos, card games and sports betting. FanDuel and DraftKings quickly came north. In the first quarter of 2023, the arrangement earned the provincial government $138 million in revenue. Raptors owner MLSE also got into the game, partnering with an Australian company called PointsBet.

The sports betting gurus knew their audience, targeting young men with disposable income, a deep love of the game and a passing knowledge of statistics. Following trends in crypto and day trading, companies designed apps that catered to the same impulses, with reams of stats and “expert” insights on every player, team and game. This smorgasbord of information creates an illusion of control, fostering the idea that, armed with enough data, bettors can beat the house. But the odds, of course, are against them: the same companies feeding their users data have better analytics than anyone, and they’re not accustomed to losing money.

Buffeted by ads, promotions with influencers and a growing presence in the podcast-verse, sports fans can be forgiven for taking the bait. Gamblers can make prop bets on almost any imaginable aspect of the game, including whether a player will do better or worse than their statistical average. Betting “over” on a player with a history of injury who does surprisingly well, or “under” on a high performer having a bad night, can mean big money. And if a player were to take himself out of a game early, well, that would work too.

Sports betting apps, like casinos before them, soon discovered that a small number of big spenders could make up an outsized portion of their balance sheets. According to one former sports betting insider, companies are in constant competition for these VIPs. Identified by their spending habits and wooed with invitation-only perks, these premium bettors are assigned a dedicated account executive whose job is to ply them with booths at nightclubs, free courtside seats and other benefits designed to keep them playing. “They’re not telling VIPs to keep gambling,” the insider says. “But they go above and beyond to keep them happy.”

By virtue of Porter’s contract with Memphis, he became one of these white whales. For the first time in his life, he was earning seven figures, and he was going to spend it. FanDuel granted him a VIP account and all the pampering that came with it. After chasing adrenalin on the court, he doubled the rush by betting on other leagues in his downtime. Over the next two years, cheered on by FanDuel, Porter reportedly gambled away millions of dollars across more than a thousand wagers. His day trading was ramping up too. One $3,000 investment jumped to $40,500 in three months. Porter declared himself “KING DIAMOND HAND TAY” on Discord. “The market is free money if you know what you doin,” he wrote. With his VIP account and public trading ventures, Porter would have been a magnet for predators who try to game the system, looking for an edge wherever they can find it. And there was no better edge than an NBA player who could shape the outcomes of games directly.

There was just one problem: Porter didn’t seem long for the league. His knee continued to trouble him, and in the 2021/22 season, he barely played, making only 11 appearances, each less than five minutes. The Grizzlies soon decided he wasn’t worth millions and waived him from their roster. Early cancellation got Porter a $300,000 lump sum, meagre compared to his former salary. After two years playing for G League teams, he signed with the Detroit Pistons in October of 2023, but he was waived again that same month. Without a fat contract, any gambling debts would have been hard to service.

---

By 2024, Porter had racked up serious gambling debts

---

Even in 2023, when Porter signed a two-way contract to play with the Raptors and their G League team, the Raptors 905, he earned only $400,000 a year. But it was a chance to get his life back on track. The Raptors had just lost versatile forward Ron Harper Jr. to injury and needed a decent jack of all trades to replace him. There was a future for Porter here that could have brought him a seven-figure upgrade—if he could impress.

It was around this time that he likely met Ammar Awawdeh, a resident of Brooklyn with a cadre of shady friends who were keen to gamble—legally and not. Porter started making prohibited wagers shortly after he joined the Raptors. As a professional player, he was forbidden from betting on NBA basketball, but if he borrowed a friend’s phone, no one would know the difference. So that’s exactly what he did, placing at least 13 bets on NBA games using an associate’s account. Over three months in early 2024, he put down $54,094 in wagers, netting a profit of $21,965. It was a decent complement to his salary, but a risky one: beyond the possibility of getting caught, he was now in danger of being blackmailed in perpetuity. By using a proxy to bet on basketball, Porter gave that proxy leverage—and if his bets didn’t hit, he would still owe them money. By the winter of 2024, Porter had racked up a serious gambling debt to Awawdeh, who now had the power to end Porter’s career in an instant.

According to American prosecutors, Awawdeh pressured Porter into performing what he called “specials” for him and his friends. His scheme was simple: he and his co-conspirators planned to place bets against Porter’s performance. Then Porter would intentionally exit games early, claiming injury, and sit on the bench to ensure the wagers hit. They coordinated the spot-fixing conspiracy in a group chat on Telegram, an app that allows users to send encrypted, disappearing messages. Oddly, Awawdeh demanded that Porter screenshot one particular exchange from early 2024: he messaged Porter that he, Ammar Awawdeh, born on July 23, 1991, was “forcing” Porter to “do this.”

Awawdeh allegedly looped in Long Phi “Bruce” Pham and Shane Hennen. Pham was a 38-year-old Vietnamese American in Queens who claimed to be in the top one per cent of poker players in the world. While Pham had never been convicted of a crime, prosecutors allege that he organized underground poker games. Hennen was a serial criminal based in Las Vegas who, in addition to being convicted for cocaine distribution, had stabbed a man nearly to death with a box cutter in a 2009 bar fight. Since at least 2020, Hennen had found a new life as a professional gambler and influencer, going by “Sugar Shane.” He sold what he called “exclusive plays”—ostensibly, bets with good odds—for a minimum of $99 apiece. Other poker players had accused both Pham and Hennen of fixing several high-stakes games in LA in 2023. Also in on the Porter scheme were Timothy McCormack of New York and Mahmud Mollah of Lansdale, Pennsylvania.

By January 22, 2024, the plan was in motion. During a Raptors game against the Memphis Grizzlies, Porter sustained an eye injury. While waiting to get it checked, he sent Pham a string of texts. “Idk if imma play much more,” he wrote. “I’m not starting second half.” A team doctor diagnosed a corneal abrasion, but Porter didn’t complain any further, which, crucially, kept him off the NBA’s official injury list—and left him eligible to play in future games.

---

In his worst betrayal, Porter bet that his own team would lose

---

Four days later, he was back on the court facing the LA Clippers. “Hit unders for the big numbers,” Porter had texted Pham. “I told [Awawdeh] no blocks no steals. I’m going to play first 2-3 minute stint off the bench then when I get subbed out tell them my eye killing me again.” He entered midway through the first quarter, but he was hardly the focus: Kawhi Leonard was back in town. Porter stayed out of the spotlight, clocking a single assist and three rebounds. But he appeared visibly distracted. Lined up for a Clippers free throw, he stood bolt upright as his teammates leaned forward. While they watched the shooter, Porter, hands on his hips, looked ahead, then to the court, then back into the distance: anywhere but at the game. No one in the arena knew it, but he was playing for a different team.

Walking off the court at the end of the first quarter, he gestured to his left eye and spoke to an official. His coach benched him. After he left the court, a relative of Awawdeh’s won $85,000 on a $10,000 bet. McCormack turned $7,000 into $40,250. Through February and March, Porter’s performance varied, looking every bit like the typical up-and-down fortunes of a mid-level player. It was also during this period that Porter committed his biggest betrayal: he placed a wager on a Raptors game, betting that his own team would lose.

The group set up their most ambitious con for the Raptors’ match against the Sacramento Kings on March 20. For days beforehand, Porter laid the groundwork: he complained of food poisoning to friends, team officials and his own family. In a Telegram group chat, he told Pham, Awawdeh and Mollah that he’d claim illness to remove himself from the game early. The group settled on a profit-sharing scheme: Porter, Pham, Awawdeh and Mollah would each receive 24 per cent of the profits from that day’s wagers, with the remaining four per cent going to McCormack. Hennen was allegedly tipped off by Pham to place his own bets. “Please don’t leak it,” Pham texted Hennen. “I’m not,” he responded.

Awawdeh, McCormack, Mollah and Pham gathered at the Resorts Casino and Hotel in Atlantic City to watch the game. They dug into fries, wings and Cokes at the on-site Ruby’s Diner, where Mollah snapped a selfie of the four of them. Shortly afterward, he walked to a cashier at the casino with Awawdeh, holding a blue gift bag full of money. The casino is partnered with DraftKings, which operates a 5,000-square-foot sports betting floor with a 15-foot-tall wall of LED screens and 24-hour betting kiosks. It would have been into one of these that Mollah deposited nearly $77,000. Less than an hour later, he placed a bet for the group. He wagered $80,000 on a parlay—a set of several bets that pays out only if all its constituent parts come true—that Porter would come up short on assists, rebounds, points, three pointers, steals and blocks.

As promised, Porter played the first quarter. He hardly appeared to be a man suffering from crippling indigestion. And yet, when the next quarter began, he was back on the bench. Porter had underperformed again, which was excellent news for his casino buddies. That any player would fail on every possible metric was a wildly unlikely proposition and therefore a highly lucrative one. Mollah won $1,120,000. By the terms of their agreement, that meant $271,590 for Porter—roughly three-quarters of his yearly salary. By underperforming, Porter had won big.

When the NBA endorsed legal betting, one of the purported benefits was to shine disinfecting sunlight on the shady world of black-market bookies. Sports betting companies are obligated by law to give independent monitors access to their live data so they can comb it for irregularities. This arrangement suits the gambling companies just fine: it allows them to seem like responsible corporate citizens while protecting their profits from cheaters. It was these independent monitors who saw Mollah’s massive bet and immediately knew something was wrong. Everything about it was absurd. ­Porter—hardly a LeBron James or Steph Curry—didn’t warrant that kind of betting action, and the multi-part bet had incredibly low odds. Before Mollah could withdraw the bulk of his payday, DraftKings froze his account.

Both FanDuel and DraftKings quickly identified the rest of Mollah’s suspicious bets on Porter, dating back to the January 26 game where Porter had claimed an eye injury. The two apps discovered that the prop bets made by the conspirators on the January 26 and March 20 games were the largest payouts on both nights. This called for immediate escalation: they reported their findings to the NBA and the International Betting Integrity Association, which in turn alerted the FBI. It took only two weeks for the news to reach Porter. On April 4, he texted the group chat that they “might get hit w a rico”—a violation of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act—and asked if they had deleted everything from their phones.

On April 10, Awawdeh texted Mollah, asking him to “hound” one of the apps to reopen his account. “At least get me back my principal $,” he wrote. On May 31, the US government attempted to question McCormack, who tipped off Pham, who then tried to buy $100,000 worth of Rolex watches and send them to his sister. That same day, Pham texted a friend, “We’ll see if they pick me up at the airport when I try to leave the country.” On June 3, Pham was arrested at JFK as he prepared to board a flight to Sydney, Australia, with $12,000 in cash, two cashier’s cheques totalling $80,000, a series of betting slips and three cellphones. Awawdeh was arrested the same day, and three days later both McCormack and Mollah appeared in court. All told, just over six weeks had passed since they had gathered in Atlantic City.

On April 17, 2024, Porter received the ultimate punishment: the NBA banned him for life. The league’s investigation found that Porter had wagered $54,094 on NBA basketball while with the Raptors.

Two stories began to emerge. Porter’s lawyers, perhaps predictably, spread the idea that Porter was a gambling addict, a young man drowning in debt and desperate to dig his way out. To that end, he checked in to an inpatient facility for gambling addiction treatment. The sports betting apps pushed a different narrative: cheaters, of which Porter was one, will be caught. That monitors had detected Mollah’s bet so early was spun as proof that modern sports betting organizations weren’t so easily fooled. And for the NBA, Porter was the perfect sacrifice. As analyst Danny Chau noted in the Ringer, he was little more than an aspiring star, one the league could easily make an example of. Lifetime bans are rare, but this wasn’t the first time the NBA had axed a cheater. In 1961, it expelled a group of players who were implicated in a points-shaving conspiracy.

Some experts say that fraudsters are an inevitability regardless of whether sports betting is legal. Now that everything is out in the open, the authorities are simply in a better position to catch them. But others are convinced that there’s a causal connection between the legalization of sports betting and the uptick in people trying to game the system. Not only are the apps available to anyone, but it’s harder to get caught: the millions of bets placed daily provide the perfect cover. As long as fraudsters don’t get too ambitious, it’s easy to avoid detection.

In the Porter case, Pham, Mollah and McCormack have all pleaded guilty. Awawdeh was swiftly indicted, but Hennen was the outlier—he made a run for it. When authorities were closing in last year, he seemed unfazed: an April 2024 Instagram post shows him at a shisha lounge, tongue out, with the caption, “My mood after winning 7 of [the] last 8!!” In January, he bought a one-way ticket to Colombia but was arrested in Las Vegas as he tried to board his flight. He was carrying multiple cellphones and nearly $10,000 in cash. Arguing to deny him bail, the US government accused Hennen of orchestrating a plot that went far beyond the Porter scheme. The prosecution said he had arranged betting frauds that resulted in profits of millions of dollars, that he had extraordinary financial resources and access to a network of conspirators across the country—­implying that Porter may not have been the only player he was working with. Other potential suspects are beginning to come to light. The Miami Heat’s Terry Rozier is under federal investigation over a 2023 game, a case that is reportedly tied to Porter’s. (While Rozier was cleared by the NBA, the federal case is ongoing.) Last January, four of the University of New Orleans Privateers’ top players were suspended for possible violations related to sports betting, and a month later, NCAA investigators discovered that members of Porter’s gambling ring were linked to the case. (There has yet to be a finding.) The sports betting boom, it seems, is far from over.

In July, Porter’s mother, Lisa, and his pregnant wife, Kelli, swore themselves as sureties to his $250,000 bond at a courthouse in Brooklyn. Half an hour later, as Porter prepared to enter his plea, the judge asked how he was doing. “I’m doing good, your honour,” he replied. Porter then solemnly pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud conspiracy. His sentencing is scheduled for December, and he’s facing more than four years in prison. (I reached out to Porter’s lawyers and family, as well as to the lawyers representing Pham, Hennen, Awawdeh, McCormack and Mollah, but none provided a response.)

Seven days after Porter entered a plea, he asked, through his lawyers, if he could get his passport back. He wanted to travel to Patras, Greece, where he could live with his wife and newborn child, continue his treatment for gambling addiction and play for the Promitheas Patras, a team in the Greek Basketball League. Porter, his lawyers stressed, had no other skills, having dropped out of college to enter the draft. He was 24, and his years as a prime-aged athlete were ticking away. But the judge rejected the request. Porter’s luck had officially run out.

This story appears in the June 2025 issue of Toronto Life magazine. To subscribe, click here. To purchase single issues, click here.