College students learn the signs of sports corruption
A regular-season college basketball game between the St. John’s Red Storm and the Wagner Seahawks would not, on its face, appear to draw much fanfare.
But with St. John’s heavily favored to win, the NCAA game between the two New York schools was the subject of a failed match-fixing scheme uncovered in December 2018 as part of a federal organized crime investigation.
News reports detailed how a 25-year-old Staten Island man offered thousands of dollars to members of the Wagner team to lose the game by more than the 17-point spread. The man, Benjamin Bifalco, a graduate from Wagner, was caught on a wiretap discussing his scheme with a member of the Colombo crime family, and pleaded guilty in February 2020 to attempted sports bribery.
The case demonstrates how easily corruption can seep into sports. It’s studied by students at the University of New Haven who are learning how to identify and investigate match-fixing and other types of corruption.
The new program at UNH bills itself as the first in the United States to train students to safeguard sports — and it comes as more states, including Connecticut, move to legalize sports gambling. That’s leading to a demand for professionals who can spot a rigged game or irregularities in betting.
“The existential issue for sports is corruption, and cleaning it up, and making sure that it’s not there,” said Declan Hill, a former investigative reporter and an expert on match-fixing and corruption in international sports, who leads the Sports Integrity program at UNH. “There are lots of jobs in this industry and I think it’s one of those things that America is coming really late to a tsunami of corruption and matchfixing, which has hit sports around the world.”
Hill, who authored the book “The Fix: Organized Crime and Soccer,” has investigated the impact of globalized betting on international sports, including probing the impact of the Russian mafia on the National Hockey League.
An energetic and fervent proponent for strong safeguards in legalized sports gambling, Hill has invited some of the most infamous names tied to sports corruption to speak to his class, including Tim Donaghy, the former NBA referee at the center of the league’s gamefixing scandal in 2007, who was caught betting on games he officiated.
The wrongdoing has infiltrated all levels of sports from high school to professional teams, and even esports. Ron Johnson, the first student to go through the program, said he sees mid-level college sports as ideal targets for match-fixing because there’s less attention on the games, while the odds are essentially the same.
“Nobody is really paying attention to a St John’s-Wagner basketball game,” Johnson said.
Matthew Lind, another UNH graduate who completed the program, said students create their own sportsbooks to learn how to track odds throughout a game to spot unusual betting behavior.
“They taught us to look at how the odds are moving and how the match itself is going. If they don’t match up, flag it and investigate,” Lind says. In some cases, the potentially nefarious behavior might be obvious such as “Why is someone placing so much money on a team that’s losing.”
The 2018 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that paved the way for states to legalize sports gambling was “one of largest societal transformations in America since the end of prohibition,” according to Hill, who said regulators have not focused enough attention on the risks posed by legalization — money laundering and gambling addiction.
Much of the focus instead has been on the tax revenue that could be generated and how that money can be spent. Connecticut’s tax coffers gained about $1.7 million from sports wagering in November, the first full month of legal betting.
While Hill supports legalized sports betting because it “takes it out of the hands of organized crime,” he said the patchwork system in the U.S., with regulations varying across states, is an “open invitation for money laundering.”
Uniform guidelines are needed at the federal level, Hill said — something that even the National Football League has requested.
“The NFL has said, ‘please give us federal regulations. Give us some guidelines,’” Hill said. “Is it legal to offer bets on Tier 3 NCAA sports? The NCAA hates it, but some bookmakers are offering it.”