Federal prosecutors allege a Georgia man named John Mazzola — nickname “John South” — played on the “Cheating Team” in rigged poker games in Manhattan and Miami. The brazen, high-tech scheme was backed by the Mafia and raked in millions of dollars, according to an indictment unsealed this week.
At least some of this came as news to Mazzola’s wife.
“We don’t even own our own home. He drives a piece-of-crap truck. They can check every account,” Tasha Mazzola said in a phone interview Friday.
“I can tell you, he doesn’t even know half of those people on the list,” she added, referring to the 30 other defendants charged in what investigators dubbed “Operation Royal Flush.” She said her husband hasn’t played poker in New York City “in years” after he was robbed of his shoes and other belongings at gunpoint during a game.
The government’s 22-page indictment suggests there is more to the story. In prosecutors’ telling, Mazzola was part of a criminal plot to lure big-fish gamblers to ritzy tables surreptitiously outfitted with card-scanning devices, X-rays and other cheating equipment. Mazzola, 43, also allegedly participated in an armed robbery to steal a manipulated shuffling machine.
He is charged with wire fraud conspiracy, money laundering conspiracy and robbery conspiracy. He appeared before a judge Thursday, and he was released with what authorities called a substantial bail package.
The defendants’ backstories and their alleged criminal enterprise were starting to come into focus Friday, a day after federal officials announced two extraordinary investigations into the parallel worlds of illegal underground gambling and insider sports betting.
The poker probe ensnared Chauncey Billups, head coach of the Portland Trail Blazers, and a dozen associates of the “Five Families,” the Italian Mafia clans that have long ruled organized crime in the New York area.
“The fraud is mind-boggling,” FBI Director Kash Patel told reporters at a news conference Thursday, referring to the alleged wrongdoing as a “criminal enterprise that envelops both the NBA and La Cosa Nostra.” At least one of the mobsters charged is an alleged captain in the Gambino crime family whose first felony conviction dates back to 1999.
But some defendants appear to have been living in relative anonymity. Officials have released little information about Sophia Wei — nickname “Pookie” — the only woman charged in the poker ring case.
In an interview on Friday, Wei’s former landlord in Queens, New York, said he formed a negative impression of her during the decade she lived in his building.
“She was nasty. She was arrogant. She was a diva. She wouldn’t let me come upstairs if I needed to do a repair,” said Ashley Scharge, 66, who lives in Bayside. “Then she skipped out on me. She left my place in shambles, stuff all over the place — clothes, food.”
Wei did not return requests for comment on Friday.
In the indictment, federal prosecutors characterized Wei as a member of a “Cheating Team.” Billups was a “Face Card,” a high-profile person who the orchestrators believed could help draw in unsuspecting gamblers to fixed tables.
Billups and Wei can be seen together in a photograph obtained by NBC News. The picture was taken in May 2019 during a game organized by Wei at a high-end hotel in New York City, where cocktail waitresses offered massages and beverages to the attendees as they played.
The raft of court documents unsealed Thursday sketch out how the alleged cheating worked — and, in at least one case, when it came close to going off the rails.
In the middle of a game in Las Vegas in 2019, Wei and other defendants realized Billups was winning too many improbable hands — thanks to the rigged shuffling machine. In text messages that were included in the government’s detention memorandum, Wei suggests that Billups attempt to avert suspicion by losing on purpose.
In all, prosecutors say the scheme netted more than $7 million over six years.
The FBI said it is still pursuing other leads.
“It’s like anything. You peel back the onion, there’s more layers,” said Christopher Raia, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York field office. “This investigation is very much ongoing.”
