00:00Our office is announcing criminal charges against 26 defendants that we
00:08allege perpetrated a transnational criminal scheme to fix NCAA Division I
00:14men's basketball games as well as professional Chinese Basketball
00:18Association games. In the indictment and related filings that we unsealed today,
00:24we allege an extensive international criminal conspiracy of NCAA players
00:30alumni and professional betters who fixed games across the country and
00:36poisoned the American spirit of competition for monetary gain. But in its
00:41essence, this is a prosecution of the criminal corruption of collegiate
00:46athletics. And as we allege in the indictment, this was a scheme that
00:50spanned three years and eventually enveloped 17 NCAA Division I men's
00:56programs, dozens of college athletes in fixed games. You can bet on sports to
01:02win or lose, but you can also bet on games in terms of whether a team will
01:06win or lose by a certain amount. And that's called a point spread. The
01:10scheme here was the defendants would identify a game in which a corrupted
01:16player had a team that was favored to lose. And then they would bribe said
01:21the player to deliberately underperform so that his team would lose by more than
01:26they were favored to. They would bet for them to not cover the point spread.
01:31Mr Fairley, Mr Hennon and these other leaders
01:35would bribe NCAA basketball players to the tune of $10,000 to $30,000 per game.
01:43The player would then agree to deliberately underperform in the game in which his team
01:49was favored to lose by a certain amount of points. They would then try to lose the game
01:57by more than that amount. So for example, if a team was favored to lose by four points,
02:02the player would receive a bribe to underperform so that his team would lose more than that.
02:07They did so with carefully orchestrated FaceTime calls to obscure and prevent their communications
02:15from being intercepted and recorded. They recruited other players. They had players recruit their
02:22teammates. And this scheme and this conspiracy eventually mushroomed. It eventually enveloped 17
02:29NCAA Division I programs, 39 players, and 29 games that we allege were either fixed or attempted to be fixed.
02:41It enveloped the world of college basketball. It included conferences such as the Big East,
02:47the Atlantic 10 Conference, the Sun Belt, the Horizon League. It involved games against nationally ranked
02:53programs. It involved games in the playoffs of conference championships.
02:57It was a significant corruption of the integrity of sports. Once a player received a bribe, Mr.
03:04Fairley and Mr. Hennon would then place substantial amounts of money to the tune of hundreds of thousands
03:09of dollars per game to enrich themselves, to the tune of an aggregate loss of millions of dollars
03:16and fraudulent sports bets on bribed and fixed games.
03:29Thank you very much.
