Moose, the Money and a Garbage-Time God: A PTFO Investigation

Pablo Torre: In too many Chicago neighborhoods, access to fresh food is a luxury, not a given. Gardeneers is working to change that by supporting school garden programs that empower students to grow their own produce, learn about nutrition, and fight back against systemic food injustice. These aren't just gardens. They're pathways to health, education, and equity. Learn how you can help at gardeneers.org. Let's grow food justice in Chicago together.

Pablo Torre: I'm Pablo Torre, and this episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out is brought to you by Remy Martin 1738 Accord Royale. Exceptionally smooth cognac for all your game day festivities. Please drink responsibly, because today we're going to find out what this sound is.

[Sound of a basketball game]

Pablo Torre: Yeah, I mean, I know a lot of people in the basketball and the gambling space. So, work does get around. Eventually, it gets to me from people that I know. Right after this ad.

[Transition]

Pablo Torre: I have slept for like four hours. We have been reporting this up till this second. We're still reporting it as we're recording this. We don't have time to waste, unfortunately. This is a very serious story, a very stupid story, and I think an almost shockingly smart story. Comedy comes in threes. It's a funny story. I feel like we're going to get another revelation. Based on how this morning and this past couple of weeks have gone, we're going to get something else here, Pablo. So just stand by as we're taping this. We continue to live, the three of us, rule of three, continue to live inside a rabbit hole that can only be described also as dank. It stinks of all sorts of things, including literally weed.

Pablo Torre: So thank you to Tom Haberstroh and Amin Elhassan for reprising your roles as PTFO correspondents. It is great to have you here.

Tom Haberstroh: It's great to be here.

Pablo Torre: Okay, so the reason I am Voltroning here with my friends Tom and Amin, the internet brain co-hosts of Basketball Illuminati, is because this episode is going to be an investigation. An investigation into the newest and quite possibly weirdest mystery in the era of legalized gambling on professional sports. And this investigation required not only a dozen sources, as well as the kind of statistical insight you can only get at TomTheFinder.com, but also in Amin, a former Phoenix Suns exec who loves Nicolas Cage movies, as you will see.

Pablo Torre: Because in April of 2024, as you might recall, an obscure Toronto Raptor named Jontae Porter got banned for life from the NBA for betting on and tanking games, allegedly, as early as January 2024. Porter ultimately pleaded guilty to a conspiracy to commit wire fraud in connection with a deli owner named Amar Awadeh and a few other gamblers. And on our YouTube channel, by the way, you can now see a photo of these co-conspirators from the federal complaint. Amar Awadeh is the guy in the top left in the red hoodie.

Pablo Torre: But that was then. A couple weeks ago, on the eve of NBA free agency, the spotlight turned to someone new.

[Sound of a news report]

News Anchor: This is a serious development for one of the NBA's top free agents right now. Sources tell me the U.S. District Attorney's Office is investigating Detroit Pistons guard Malik Beasley on allegations of gambling on NBA games and prop bets. I'm told it was during, allegedly, the 2023-2024 season.

News Anchor: Beasley and the Pistons were in serious talks on finalizing a three-year, $42 million contract that would have brought Beasley back to Detroit. The Pistons have added Duncan Robinson. They added him because Malik Beasley has some financial problems. He's got a federal investigation.

News Anchor: Source told me this situation is worse than the Porter situation. Oh, they released the information for a reason. The timing of the release is for a reason. The government wants to get as much attention as possible.

News Anchor: Oh, this is FBI? This isn't local. This is FBI? Yeah, this is under federal investigation.

News Anchor: Oh, listen, brother, look. I know one thing. For certain two things for sure. If it's local police, you've got a 50-50 chance against the government.

Pablo Torre: And if this scandal is the first you have ever really thought about Malik Beasley, perhaps because you're not addicted to NBA Twitter, as the three of us are, I get it. Malik Beasley is not super famous. He's played for six different teams. In fact, aggressively gambling on Malik Beasley was itself a red flag. According to ESPN, what one U.S. sportsbook detected was, quote, unusually heavy betting interest on Beasley's statistics beginning around January 2024. This was when Malik Beasley was actually with the Milwaukee Bucks, and that was one game, January 31st, 2024.

Pablo Torre: The sportsbook reported something very suspicious happened. Quote, "The odds on Malik Beasley recording fewer than two and a half rebounds moved significantly at sportsbooks before the game due to a surge of action on the under." Not a common gambling subject, right? People are betting on LeBron's points plus rebounds plus assists or Giannis over under on dunks for three-pointers made by Steph Curry. You're not digging deep for Malik Beasley rebounds.

Pablo Torre: And so on the eve of free agency, we are told, when news of the resultant federal investigation broke, the Detroit Pistons were staggered. They had met with Malik Beasley, according to sources that I talked to, Malik Beasley and his agent, and were basically ironing out the markings of a $42 million contract. Three years, $42 million, which if you look at the capology, that's basically the full mid-level exception. Which Malik Beasley was so, so, so close to getting.

Pablo Torre: In fact, if there's one more thing to know about Malik Beasley right now, it is that as a basketball player, he is radically different from Jontae Porter. Malik Beasley is one of the greatest, full stop, greatest three-point shooters in NBA history. He had the Minnesota Timberwolves single season three-point field goals made record. And then a couple years later, he did the same thing with the Detroit Pistons. The list this past season, it was Anthony Edwards very narrowly, just ahead of Malik Beasley, who was ahead of Steph Curry. Malik Beasley, statistically, has scored more three-pointers per minute than any player in NBA history except for Steph Curry. Think about that. We are talking about in a three-point era, Malik Beasley does more of these things than anybody who played at least 500 games in their NBA career, except for Stephen Wardell Curry.

Pablo Torre: The reason why Malik Beasley, that number, that money vaporized, by the way, possibly Malik Beasley's career now has vaporized at age 28. And this led us to then try and monitor as much activity as we could ourselves by grinding tape. What's publicly accessible? And so what do we do? We looked for every piece of evidence we could find in the public record. And this happens to also be how we found this clip, which was buried inside a vlog on Malik Beasley's YouTube channel from six months ago during the best NBA season of Malik Beasley's career when he was with the Detroit Pistons.

Pablo Torre: And Malik Beasley is pushing a shopping cart through a Target in Detroit, and he suddenly gets spotted by an employee at the store.

[Sound of a vlog]

Malik Beasley: What's going on, bro? What's going on, bro? I need a monitor, but it's all good. I got to go practice.

Employee: You ain't got time? Huh? Y'all been on the f***ing air, bro. I appreciate it. Real f***ing. Thank you. Y'all making my FanDuel turn the f*** up.

Malik Beasley: [Holding his hands up] Whoa, whoa, whoa, FanDuel. I can't talk about that. That's right.

Pablo Torre: And as we will find out in this story, everything is so complicated. Like, even that little clip. And that's not even a clip that's been circulating on Twitter or Reddit or TikTok. We found that one buried, but the stuff that's been going viral. There's one in particular, right? That is back to his days in Minnesota. This Minnesota one viewed 14 million times. And everyone that I talked to in reporting out this story, they had all seen this clip. And they'd all laughed at this clip in ways that everybody, where it's just like, I mean, come on.

Pablo Torre: What this clip is showing us is a very alert Malik Beasley with five seconds left in the game, waiting for a free throw to be attempted by the Clippers, who are up big in this game. The Timberwolves are going to lose this game, but Malik Beasley doesn't just get the ball and let the clock run out. He gets the ball and sprints all the way down the floor.

[Sound of a basketball game]

Announcer: Beasley's going to get it off. One last shot. How about Beasley? 21 points.

Pablo Torre: And then does a two-handed dunk right before the buzzer. And what's interesting is that that cut the Clippers' lead from nine to seven. The spread on that game, guys, was eight and a half. So went from the Clippers covering to the Minnesota Timberwolves covering after that play.

Pablo Torre: The thing I'm fascinated by is the amount of people say there it is proof. Oh, that's proof. You see how he looked over there on the bench and then he looked up at the score. That's proof that these guys are gambling. I'm like, you're basically accusing someone of the ultimate crime within this profession. And so you get viral tweets with someone saying, "Malik Beasley's 100% going to jail," or "Yeah, he's done, he's finished." It's just wildly irresponsible.

Tom Haberstroh: Here's the complexity, though, that Tom is alluding to. Malik Beasley has already been to jail.

Pablo Torre: Separate story, we're going to get there, I mean. We're going to get there, we'll explain that in a bit. But one source I spoke to who was close to several of Malik Beasley's current and former NBA teammates immediately told me when I asked if he had heard anything about the gambling issues, quote, "He's a dumbass. I believe everything." End quote. So that's not enough. We had to keep digging.

Pablo Torre: The thing that we got to, guys, the real story inside the story that no one else is really talking about is this mystery. It is an online mystery that I believe, that we all now believe, is the key to understanding the story of Malik Beasley as well as this era, the era of legalized gambling in sports in general. And this mystery started in January of this year with a Twitter user who goes by the name of FreeMoose underscore NBA.

Pablo Torre: You might remember that on January 30th, 2025, a few months ago, this news broke.

[Sound of a news report]

News Anchor: Now to a developing story. The NBA confirmed Thursday that suspicious gambling activity surrounding guard Terry Rozier in a game nearly two years ago is now being investigated by federal prosecutors as a part of the same probe that led to the lifetime ban of former Raptors player Jontae Porter.

Pablo Torre: Now at the time, Rozier was playing for the Hornets. So Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier, who's under contract with the Heat as we speak, He became the second player after Jontae Porter to be publicly identified as a part of this federal investigation into sports betting. And what I'm told is, contrary to Shams Charania's reporting, is that Terry Rozier has not been cleared of any wrongdoing, only that his name came up in the existing federal investigation. And this relates directly to why Moose is this character that we're focusing on. Because FreeMoose underscore NBA, Tom, speaks to the federal investigation, which clearly is also still ongoing.

Tom Haberstroh: Right.

Pablo Torre: On that day, the same day that Terry Rozier news drops, this guy, FreeMoose underscore NBA, tweeted something that was even more provocative. Because on that day, he posted, quote, "First was Jontay, then was Rozier. Next you'll hear about capital M, four asterisks, capital B, and then six asterisks." The symmetry of the rule of three. Jontay, Rozier, M stars, B stars.

Pablo Torre: This guy, FreeMooseNBA, posted another tweet right after that one. And said, "There's another current player who's gonna have a report come out about them next, won't say the name, but they play on the Pistons right now." What this is, is the first documented mention by anyone anywhere that Malik Beasley was going to come up as part of this investigation. This is how this news actually breaks. Free Moose underscore NBA has it in that rule of three tweet.

Pablo Torre: And in this reporting, I determined this guy at the time of this tweet had something like 10,000 followers. And a lot of them were like, "Huh? Like what?" One of them later that night in a tweet exchange with a Pistons fan, because Malik Beasley at this point is playing for the Pistons and being awesome. He tells Moose, "You're lying, bro. Show me any amount of proof, bro. You don't know what he means to us." And Moose says, quote, "I can't yet. I'm sorry, but gotta protect myself." 15 views on that tweet.

Pablo Torre: It's incredible. I mean, this time capsule, which is almost six months before the news breaks, right? On the eve of free agency, six months before it happens, it's happening in the mentions of this thing. So that's the crazy thing about this is maybe you think, "Oh, he's just throwing shit at the wall and trying to see what sticks, right? Shot in the dark." Then he quote tweets that tweet with a screenshot of a betting slip from January 22nd, 2024.

Pablo Torre: That betting slip is Jontae Porter unders. Under on points five and a half and under on rebounds three and a half. Now I know what you're thinking. "Oh yeah, that's the game, right?" No. The game that was in the court filings that under investigation was for the first time was January 26th. Meaning whoever placed the slip had the in on the Jontae Porter action months before the investigation was announced.

Pablo Torre: The question here is now very simple, right? On some level, because the entire internet, the entire NBA, we can now confirm this, right? Everybody begins to ask, Tom, who the f*** is Moose underscore NBA? How did a random Twitter user on NBA Twitter know about both Jontae Porter and also Malik Beasley on the day that Terry Rozier's name was included for the first time, the second of the three guys, before any of this was breaking?

Pablo Torre: Making things way more complicated is that FreeMoose underscore NBA deleted his account and then disappeared off the internet. Nobody to this day has been able to solve the mystery of who is Free Moose Underscore NBA. Until now.

Tom Haberstroh: That was good. That was good, Pablo.

Pablo Torre: I just need people to know this is a story that involves not just Free Moose NBA and not just Nick Cage, but also a legless woman, Carmelo Anthony, meme coins, my old friend Larsa Pippen, and arguably, guys, arguably, the greatest play in modern Knicks history.

[Sound of a basketball game]

Announcer: Hartenstein gets it out to Ananobi. DiVincenzo at three. Bang! Bang! Knicks take a one-point lead with 13 seconds remaining. The garden is shaking right now.

Pablo Torre: And none of you will ever look at that play the same way again.

[Transition]

Pablo Torre: Okay, so before we get back to the mystery of FreeMoose underscore NBA, we need to also very quickly explain here, as much as we can, where Malik Beasley himself actually comes from. And I did not fully appreciate this until we, again, we got into the rabbit hole on him. I did not know this at all until we started digging into all of this. Malik Beasley comes from Hollywood, right? His parents are both actors. His mom has had small roles in Tyler Perry movies, in The Hunger Games, in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call with the aforementioned Nicholas Cage.

[Sound of a movie scene]

Dina Beasley: Help me, please. Please help my family. Kill her for my family, please, sir. Help me. Help it's not just.

Pablo Torre: Dina Beasley, the mom. It's also his father, Michael Beasley. Not that Michael Beasley, different Michael Beasley. He's got over 80 acting credits on IMDb. Denzel Washington is friends with him. He calls him the king of the Hollywood South because Michael Beasley has appeared in so many movies and TV shows living in Atlanta. And he and Denzel were together in The Great Debaters and Flight and Two Guns.

[Sound of a movie scene]

Michael Beasley: Tell us about your trip. Lawyer. What's the big deal? Lawyer. You were down in Sonora, weren't you? You don't think Agent Jessup and the DA know about you and Poppy Greco? Lawyer. Lawyer. They know you were at his ranch. I know I need a lawyer.

Pablo Torre: The fact of the matter is that the actual famous actor that started this all was Malik Beasley's grandfather, John Beasley. He's the most famous one. He was in The Sum of All Fears. He was also in The Mighty Ducks. And the thing that I just could not believe is that he is the assistant coach that you might remember from Rudy.

[Sound of a movie scene]

John Beasley: My job is to basically beat the shit out of you for the next five days. And whoever is still standing at the end, maybe we'll use for our scout teams.

Pablo Torre: Malik Beasley, if you're wondering, got drafted 19th overall by the Denver Nuggets, out of Florida State, but he also likes to say, if you get him one-on-one, that he was a bit of a child actor himself.

[Sound of a YouTube live stream]

Malik Beasley: Honestly, if you want to see me in the background, I'm an extra. Look in Madea's Family Reunion.

Interviewer: What were you doing as an extra, bro?

Malik Beasley: I was an extra in Madea's Family Reunion. If you want to see me, I was dancing with my mom.

Pablo Torre: I don't think any show has ever investigated Madea's Family Reunion more thoroughly than Pablo Torre Finds Out. We assigned a certain fact checker, producer, to go through the film a total of five f***ing times. We're looking for young Malik Beasley dancing with Dina, right? We're looking for this scene that he describes on that YouTube live stream with Neon. And we regret to report that we could not find this. We have no evidence of it. We're fact-checking every element of this story, as you will see, as much as we can.

Pablo Torre: But something we did find instead is a quote that Malik's parents gave to an outlet called noiseomaha.com in 2022. According to Michael, his dad, quote, "Sometimes Malik wants what we have and so he's in a rush to get it. People think because these guys have a lot of money, they're mature." End quote. Dina, the mom, adds that making millions of dollars at a young age, quote, "does not equate to knowledge or experience." End quote.

Pablo Torre: Which I think naturally does bring us to the time we mentioned before, where Malik Beasley, in real life, did go to jail. What you should know about that incident was it came in the spring of 2020. When Malik was with the Minnesota Timberwolves, he got married to a woman named Montana Yao. And by the fall of that year, his house had been mistakenly added to what is known as the Parade of Homes Tour. Which in the Minneapolis area is not just a big event. This is one of the biggest home tours across the country.

[Sound of a news report]

News Anchor: Now, if you're looking for something to do this weekend that doesn't include large groups of people, how about taking a drive to explore some of the beautiful homes on the Spring Parade of Homes tour? Yeah, there's 434 houses open noon to 6 today and tomorrow.

Pablo Torre: This is when a car full of people pull up to Malik Beasley's house. And apparently in the court records of this incident, he had roped off the driveway.

Tom Haberstroh: That you're allowed to be in.

Pablo Torre: Your parade is not welcome here is the implication.

Tom Haberstroh: Exactly. Move along.

Pablo Torre: And so this car pulls up to the side of the road, not in his driveway, to the side of the road to figure out what are we going to do next? And that's when they turn and they hear a knock on the window. And Malik Beasley came out. He pointed a rifle at the car. And that incident was reported to the police. The police come to the property, Malik Beasley's house, and they search his house. And this criminal complaint, I mean, which we pulled on this, you learn that the officers found multiple guns, almost two pounds of weed, a note, this is my favorite detail, a notebook that had written across the cover, in all caps, the word "TRAP" with two exclamation points. And the notebook contained, in case you were, of course, wondering, quote, "Rules for smoking marijuana in the home." And one of the rules, quote, "Only spend $2,500 a month on weed." End quote.

Amin Elhassan: Only.

Pablo Torre: Are you sure that notebook isn't also in Pablo Torre's house?

[Laughter]

Pablo Torre: Two months after this incident comes to light, right? He signs a four-year, $60 million extension. His big payday. Like, he did it. He not just made it to the NBA, but he was able to get that big second contract that every NBA player wants. And what an awesome week for him and his wife, Montana Yao. Right? Just imagine. $60 million comes in. Except three days after that deal gets signed. And this is also while Malik is simultaneously awaiting sentencing for the gun incident. He is photographed holding hands at a mall in Miami with a masked but unmistakable former PTFO guest like the two of you by the name of Larsa Pippen. The ex-wife of Scottie Pippen, future ex-girlfriend of Marcus Jordan, and also, crucially, a recent guest on the Jason Lee podcast.

[Sound of a podcast]

Larsa Pippen: When you look back on a Malik and go, that was a mistake, why do you think you didn't see it when I saw it? Because I had COVID brain. I had just had COVID. I was stuck in my house. I hadn't gone anywhere. And he was there and he was like on me, you know, like, let me see. Let me come see you. Let me come see you. And I thought, okay, come see me.

Pablo Torre: It should come as no surprise to everyone that Malik's wife, Montana Yao, filed for divorce.

Amin Elhassan: And so I just gotta jump in here to point out that yes, all roads do lead to Larsa Pippen, because of course they do.

Pablo Torre: And from there, Malik Beasley's road gets a lot rockier. He proceeds to plead guilty to a single felony charge of threats of violence because of the whole Parade of Homes incident, telling a courtroom in Minnesota, quote, "I'm not that person." End quote. But then that person gets sued repeatedly over approximately $8 million in total. And some of this has since been settled. But the list of creditors includes a Maryland firm that specializes in loaning money to pro athletes, his own apartment building in Detroit, his former agent in New York, his barbershop in Milwaukee, and... Not to be outdone, his dentist in Minnesota is also suing him, Dr. Hassan El-Shahabi.

Pablo Torre: And by the way, Minnesota proceeds to trade Malik Beasley to the Jazz, which trades him to the Lakers, who don't renew his contract. And so he winds up in Milwaukee that way, playing in that game on January 31st, 2024, that got flagged for suspicious betting activity. The season before that, Malik Beasley had been making about $16 million. But Malik Beasley, in the season where all of this stuff is happening, he has dropped his salary 90%. A 90% pay cut.

Pablo Torre: All of which makes the story of Malik Beasley look as simple as that wildly viral clip of him going coast to coast and covering the spread in Minnesota. But in the course of fact-checking, we wound up giving that clip, that same clip, the Madea's Family Reunion treatment, as it were. We watched the film over and over and over again before ultimately calling for a deeper statistical analysis. And we discovered something shocking about its alleged simplicity. It is not simple.

Tom Haberstroh: I talked to Mike Bowie for this story. Like, he is this analytics guru, this mastermind behind this amazing indispensable site called Impredictable.com. And most of the stats on his site are about clutch with respect to the score of the game. Meaning, you know, game within five, final five minutes. That's typically what we know as clutch. But there's this other piece that until we were reporting this story, I don't think anyone's really kind of done a research project like this. Which is, what if we were looking at clutch in terms of the spread?

Tom Haberstroh: And according to Mike Bowie's numbers, he looked at this since 2021, so the last five seasons. Here are the numbers. Garbage time, so when the game is out of reach, but Vegas clutch situations, the spread is still in play. Malik Beasley shot 62% effective field goal percentage, which is weighted for three-pointers, on 147 attempts. Garbage time and Vegas garbage time situations, which means both the game is out of reach and the spread is not in play. Malik Beasley goes from 62% of field goal percentage up to 64% of field goal percentage. So what this says is, when the game is meaningless in both the score and the Vegas spread, he gets even better. Malik Beasley is a garbage time god. That Minnesota Timberwolves clip, that's just Malik Beasley all the time.

Pablo Torre: And so I do want to just now focus, though, on the most compelling piece of evidence that has been reported, right? Which is that there was, Tom, this unusual betting activity, this spike in betting activity. This is seemingly the one and only identifiable example so far that we have. And it's this flurry of bets on the under for Malik Beasley rebounds, again, a prop bet, in that Bucks-Blazers game on January 31st, 2024. So what is the real story with that particular example then?

Tom Haberstroh: Right. The key thing here is that the line was at two and a half rebounds. In that game, where all this unusual betting activity is coming in on the under, guess what happens? Malik Beasley gets six rebounds. So the bet is Malik Beasley is going to tank this very tankable category, just not going to try. I mean, and instead, he has one of the better rebounding games of his season. He's busting his ass. Look at the film. He's busting his ass trying to get every rebound imaginable. He looks like Charles Barkley out there.

Pablo Torre: Again, on our YouTube channel, which you should be at already, like, we're going through the video here. You can see it. This is the crazy part of this story, is even the betting activity on Jontae Porter, those cashed because he left the games early, right? And all the alleged co-conspirators were betting the unders and Jontae Porter was taking himself out of these games, effectively clinching the unders, and those bets were cashing. The opposite happened.

Pablo Torre: And Malik Beasley, he's out on the perimeter defending his man. The shot goes up, and he sprints from across the floor to go haul in a rebound on the other side of the floor over DeAndre Ayton, who's seven feet tall, and he's making multiple efforts trying to get these rebounds. You would have thought that the betting activity he was on the other side. Based on what Malik Beasley's behaviors in this game is, it is so contradictory to the betting activity, to what he actually did in the game. If the guy was on the take, he was awful at being on the take.

Pablo Torre: And the through line here when it comes to this part of the story, right, is that it's actually, Tom, really hard to find evidence in this category, at least, of malfeasance in Milwaukee. Right? His Bucks tenure on tape, when you grind all of it, you don't see the giant smoking gun. It kind of becomes clear, actually, that at this point in our journey, the most important publicly accessible evidence available to us was not going to come from the Bucks. It was going to have to come from a moose.

[Ad break]

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Pablo Torre: So the mystery, right, the mystery we've been teasing of how in the hell some random Twitter user had predicted six months before the Malik Beasley news broke that Malik Beasley was going to become the third NBA player investigated for gambling. This brings us to one immediate problem when it comes to contacting an account whose avatar happens to be a stuffed toy moose wearing a little blue sweater with an NBA logo on the front that is also trapped behind bars like in a jail cell. Right, this is FreeMoose_NBA.

Tom Haberstroh: Going on a moose hunt.

Pablo Torre: Not a silly goose hunt. Every parent knows.

Tom Haberstroh: I don't know that song.

Pablo Torre: Do-do-do-do-do. But speaking of stuff that gets stuck in your head, as we had established, FreeMoose_NBA deleted his Twitter account and disappeared entirely. Which is a problem here. But here's the thing. The tweets that tagged FreeMoose_NBA are still around. And after scrolling through a thousand orphaned replies and direct messaging a few of those posters, it became clear that FreeMoose_NBA used to go by another handle: At Moose_NBA. But At Moose_NBA got suspended by Twitter at one point. Hence the call for freedom. This is the original Moose NBA account. And the bio says "NBA takes you can get behind. Meme coin expert." And then my favorite emoji, a stock chart going up. And then deep inside a haystack of hundreds upon hundreds of truly useless tweets that tagged Moose_NBA, Tom found a needle. A needle posted by a self-described LeBron fan account. This one caught my eye because it not only tagged At Moose_NBA, but it also tagged a second account: Underscore Mustafa Underscore Omar. So he says, "Yo, Underscore Mustafa Underscore Omar, your s*** got suspended. WTF?" And then he tags At Moose_NBA. Heartbreak emoji. Which I think takes us to what "Moose" might actually be referring to as a name, again nailing the pronunciation. Because I suppose it means that some Mustafas also might go by Moose. The most common nickname of anybody with an Arabic name is if your name's Mohammed, probably people are going to call you Mo. If your name's Mustafa, probably people are going to call you Moose.

Tom Haberstroh: Yes.

Pablo Torre: But the problem with Underscore Mustafa Underscore Omar, as you can tell, is that this account didn't exist anymore either. But when you searched for that specific handle, Underscore Mustafa Underscore Omar, on Elon Musk's deeply broken platform, something interesting happened. An even weirder account kept popping up. And this one was actively tweeting about the Knicks. This was at 123-747-484-849, lowercase A. This is the Tom Cruise Mission Impossible latex mask of Twitter, right? We're just like, numbers. They'll never guess who it is. But if you obsessively scroll through the tweets sent by At 123-747-4849, lowercase A, long enough, it turns out you can stumble across another clue. Another needle. And this one was a reply to another former PTFO guest, At Worldwide Wobb. Rob Perez. A crucial note on the Knicks social graph on Twitter. Because Robb was running a promo where the prize was a signed Jalen Brunson jersey. And when At 123-747-4849-A replied to Wobb and included the screenshot of his personal account on a fantasy sports crypto platform as proof, there it was, in full clarity for the first time. We had traced FreeMoose_NBA, the account that prophesied that Malik Beasley would be the next player named as part of a federal sports gambling investigation, to a government name. Mustafa Omar.

Pablo Torre: But now, we needed a face. What we then did was we found the same Mustafa Omar account on Facebook and also on Instagram. And the latter two, Facebook and Instagram, you see a young man, trimmed beard, blue top that happens to be a Carmelo Anthony Knicks jersey. How about that? One of the DMs that I sent in the past couple weeks, I was trying to get to the bottom of this story, and one of the sources sent us a screenshot of a since-deleted post from Moose_NBA himself, which showed the same exact young man with a trim beard posting a selfie video while trying on a Knicks varsity jacket at a store. And the caption says here, "Nick's jacket, do we like or nah? Only $75, LOL." But Tom, why would someone save a screenshot of a deleted selfie video about a jacket, should he buy it or not, for 75 bucks?

Tom Haberstroh: Because a lot of people do not like Moose NBA because of what happened next.

Pablo Torre: This brings us back to the original bio of Moose NBA: "Meme coin expert." But there was this other thing we found, another Twitter account, which tagged Moose_NBA in the bio. And this account is just piles of cash. Piles and piles. A cartoonish amount of cash just as the banner photo. So this account is called Moose and Boulder's Picks. And this account sells, you guessed it, sports betting picks. Which takes us to a tweet, again, dated around Thanksgiving 2024, when this account posted, quote, "Join the Discord and forever be etched in the most transparent and successful sports betting discord there is." Turns out, Pablo, that at least a couple of people who had been in this sports betting discord, they were not thrilled with its level of transparency or, by the way, how good it was.

Pablo Torre: So you're saying they didn't make a huge pile of money like the banner would have indicated?

Tom Haberstroh: I mean, in fact, what happens next is that we obtained another screenshot from yet another member of this Discord, which again is basically like a paywalled group chat. And this screenshot shows our guy Moose also using the Discord to convince people to buy a meme coin that he calls the NCA. The NCAA stands for National Coin Association. According to one screenshot, Moose had tweeted again around Thanksgiving 2024. Quote, "I had an idea recently to make an NBA branded crypto coin. The idea was to make a Discord community incentivized around the coin. Have a nice GC, like group chat, to talk hoops, gambling, and crypto. The coin was dumped out by bots. I went down with the ship," this account says, "sacrificed $6,700." And to all of this, one account replies, quote, "It's called a pump and dump, my guy. You knew what was going on here."

Pablo Torre: This thing that we're looking at is the sort of business that would theoretically incentivize its owner to prove that he somehow has access to money, to inside information when it comes to sports betting picks, which he's selling on this side hustle thing. It would help if you were running such a business to be the guy who was, let's say, ahead on the Jontae Porter news, ahead of the Malik Beasley news, and maybe even ahead of both of those things before not just the internet or the media, but again, the Detroit Pistons themselves. Right, and so we're trying to follow the money. And when you follow that money and you follow that 123747484849-A account and look at the replies, the artist formerly known as Mustafa Omar is repeatedly bragging and sending people the screenshot of Free Moose himself predicting the prophecy, the Malik Beasley news. So he's out here in this anonymous account saying, "Hey, hey, hey, hey, don't forget about this thing. This is insane. You guys understand that?"

Tom Haberstroh: It's so funny. Let me think if I can follow the logic here. He's like, "Hey, you should trust me because I have the inside scoop on what bets are going to hit." Well, how do you have that? "Well, because I know they're cheating." The whole point is, "Oh, I know, not I know because they're fixing it."

Pablo Torre: And so as we're scrolling through these brags, right? This is the reporting process. We're scrolling through these brags. Brag, brag, brag, brag, brag, brag, brag. I had a question that occurs to me as I'm just seeing this happen over and over again. And the question for Tom was, if you were to slide into those DMs, Tom, do you think Mustafa Omar might actually want to talk?

Tom Haberstroh: What's going on? Not so much, my man.

[Phone ringing]

Tom Haberstroh: How are we doing on this fine Tuesday? Not too bad. I'm busy at work, but not too bad. I took a little time off.

Mustafa Omar: Oh, yeah? What's work for you?

Tom Haberstroh: I am a manager at an auto collision shop.

Mustafa Omar: Okay. Very cool. And where's that at? In New York somewhere?

Tom Haberstroh: Yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, cool. So thanks for getting back to me. We're doing like this story on Malik Beasley and your moose stuff came across when we were like going into the story. And so finally connecting with you is great. And so thank you for picking up.

Pablo Torre: I love Tom's just like, what level of bro am I doing here with crypto gambler, Bitcoin guy? You can hear like my throat is getting dry. I can't believe this guy is talking. It's incredible. I mean, it's just... "Hey, how are you doing on this fine Tuesday?" Like, what are you talking... The most journalistic tried and true method of knocking on the f***ing front door.

Tom Haberstroh: So what I find out is that he's in his 20s. He is a Knicks fan. Not just a Knicks fan, he is a Knicks super fan. And he goes to Madison Square Garden and everything.

Tom Haberstroh: Yeah, a bunch of things. Who would you say is your favorite Knicks player of all time?

Mustafa Omar: It's got to be Melo.

Tom Haberstroh: Carmelo Anthony?

Mustafa Omar: Yeah, it's got to be Melo.

Tom Haberstroh: But even more than that, when it comes to NBA Twitter, this guy says he's very well connected. Mustafa Omar likes finding out stuff too.

Mustafa Omar: Yeah, I mean, I go by Moose. I know a bunch of people involved in the NBA space, so if I ever have any questions, I'm able to eventually get them answered. The way that, like, you're a reporter, and you go and you ask your questions to everybody and you try to get whatever. I kind of do the same. I just do good research as well. I'm a stats guy. I was giving out stats and stuff that people wouldn't normally think of. My first ever post was a playoff scenario chart, very similar to the one that NBA PR account on Twitter posted, but mine was a day before, and then theirs looked identical to mine, which was very funny. So everybody kind of called out the fact that the NBA PR account basically ripped off my scenario chart. I started growing my account relatively quickly. Got suspended. Not sure why till this day. Made a second account. That one also got suspended. And now I'm kind of just off the grid over it because my accounts keep getting suspended.

Tom Haberstroh: Did he ever find out why he was getting suspended?

Mustafa Omar: Well, he says he doesn't know. I wasn't like the most family-friendly account either. I'm sure it's some things that people are going to take to liking sometimes. I'm sure that's possible.

Pablo Torre: I do like at this point how this guy is kind of all three of us in one person. He loves finding stuff out. He loves stats. He loves talking shit on Twitter unapologetically, like a bean. And he is the sort of guy, again, who wants people to know that he knows things, including a forthcoming report about Malik Beasley. So on January 30th, 2025, the same day that the federal investigation into Terry Rozier was announced, he tweets that thing out. The prophecy of Malik Beasley.

Tom Haberstroh: I mean, I just did it to be a little cryptic. I knew nobody would believe it, but obviously it's fine. I just put it out there just to be a little like cryptic from when it did come out. People could look back at it the way that they did when the news did came out.

Tom Haberstroh: But how did you come across the Malik Beasley info?

Mustafa Omar: Yeah, I mean, I know a lot of people in the basketball and the gambling space, so you know, word does get around. Um, eventually it gets to me from people that I know. Obviously people I'm not gonna like to hear a name, but I do have people that do know a lot about, you know, the gambling ring and NBA and stuff. And I didn't know about Beasley during when he was actually doing it.

Pablo Torre: And just to be clear here, that's Moose talking, right? He's saying Malik Beasley did it. That's not us saying that.

Mustafa Omar: I found out this past January, 2025, and obviously now they are suffering having to let him walk in free agency and replace him with somebody like Duncan Robinson, who's not even close to the caliber player that I thought Malik Beasley was this year.

Tom Haberstroh: Damn.

Pablo Torre: Whoa. Yo, this is one of my favorite things whenever we're doing content, Pablo. In my mind, Duncan Robinson's sitting back saying, "Oh, a new episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out. Let me watch." And he hears that like, "What the f*** do I do? Why do I get s*** on?"

Pablo Torre: So when I asked Mustafa Omar who told him about Malik Beasley specifically, he kept claiming that this was something he saw on Reddit, which was kind of strange.

Mustafa Omar: This is something that was dug up from Reddit. I mean, everything that I found and I tweet about, I only tweet about it because I find it publicly first. I know people, I know things, but also I saw this on Reddit.

Pablo Torre: Again, of course, we, Medea's family reunion style, scanned through everything we could find on Reddit looking for a hidden Malik Beasley. Where is Malik Beasley here? We could find nothing resembling this prediction. And of course, by the way, to state the obvious again, if this was publicly noted anywhere, then we would have probably heard about it in the way that we heard about this tweet. It would have gone viral. It would have been surfaced. The prophecy would have been someone else's and not Moose's.

Tom Haberstroh: Can I play devil's advocate and say, none of us knew Malik Beasley's dad and his mom and his grandfather were all actors.

Pablo Torre: Yeah, it's a fair point. Fair 1% seeded out to put into this.

Pablo Torre: So then I started asking Mustafa Omar, Moose, about the Jontae Porter FanDuel betting slip that he posted, which again, was placed on January 22nd, 2024, months before the Jontae Porter investigation was ever public. Now, when I asked him about this, he became cagier than he'd been at any point in our conversation.

Mustafa Omar: I said, I don't know much about the slip. Like I said, it was just sent to me from someone, but...

Tom Haberstroh: He said it was sent to him from someone else. It wasn't his betting slip. He just happened to get it and then post it onto his account.

Pablo Torre: And this is where we should mention something we have not yet told Moose, which is that deep in our reporting, we found yet another screenshot. Yes, another one from Moose's private paywall discord, where he was trying to drum up business for his next meme coin, the sequel. Not just National Coin Association, which he apparently, you know, lost his shirt on. The goal this time, a quote, "over 100 million market cap." And on November 27th, 2024, he wrote explicitly, quote, "This next project is going to have people involved that no other project would even be able to get their hands on. Some names I can't even legally mention because they made so much money off a certain NBA gambling incident last season and are facing trials, but they will be involved in this."

Tom Haberstroh: So hold on. At this point in time, November 2024, the only gambling incident known, confirmed in the NBA is Jontae Porter.

Pablo Torre: Yes. In the Jontae Porter story, the feds found this deeply sloppy private telegram chat. And the most memorable character in Jontae Porter's group chats was the owner of a deli, I mean, on Roosevelt Island here in our city of New York. And this deli owner, who I mentioned at the top of the episode, was not merely a person that Jontae Porter owed, quote, "significant gambling debts" to, according to federal prosecutors. I also remember this deli owner as a New Yorker because he had been previously embroiled in a scandal of a different kind. And this is the scandal that involved an unhoused woman who fell into the subway tracks as the F train was approaching. And as a result, she lost both of her legs. This woman sued, wound up settling with the MTA, which runs the New York City subway, for $4 million. The person that she trusted to cash one of her final settlement checks for around $800,000, according to these legal documents, happens to be this same deli owner.

Tom Haberstroh: What the f***?

Pablo Torre: By the name of Amar Awade. And Amar allegedly took that check, the city's payback, to, again, a homeless, legless, wheelchair-bound woman who was also suffering from mental illness. He took that check to his friend who was a bank manager, and then they got the $800,000 deposited into the account of his deli, which Amar denied in court in a case that was eventually dismissed, although he did admit that $80,000 did wind up in his personal account. So prosecutors, for the record here, alleged that he spent the woman's money on, quote, "gambling trips and wedding expenses, including a bachelor party in Las Vegas and honeymooning in Turks and Caicos."

Tom Haberstroh: This is as dark as it gets, this story.

Pablo Torre: I miss the part where we were talking about Larsa Pippen. Things were so lighthearted back then. What I want our audience to know is that what I started doing at this point was comb through every publicly accessible social media profile we had ever found for our guy, Moose. And while looking through the names of the people that Mustafa Omar is friends with on Facebook, I found one extremely familiar name.

Tom Haberstroh: Let me guess. Amar Awade.

Pablo Torre: F***ing nailing this pronunciation. God damn it, that was good.

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Pablo Torre: So he's not lying when he says, "I'm connected with a guy who's involved in the NBA's gambling incident."

Tom Haberstroh: Yes, a certain NBA gambling incident. There, in fact, is a connection. We have just verified that. They are literal Facebook friends.

Pablo Torre: And furthermore, what I did with my life was I naturally plunged further into the Amar Awade rabbit hole. And this one brought me to a source that I encountered here in New York City who knew him from back when they were both frequenting these allegedly illegal private poker games in Manhattan, around five to eight years ago. And my source says that this game that they were playing in actually took place in a private apartment. This is how this worked. Residential building, top floor, just blocks away from Madison Square Garden, actually. It has since moved, but that's where it was at the time. And it's the sort of game where the minimum buy-in is $2,500, a.k.a. the monthly allotment for weed, according to the trap rules that we encountered before. There is no maximum, it turns out. And it's otherwise full of lawyers and doctors and hedge fund managers. And also, according to my source, several of the names on those Jontae Porter group chats who also wound up getting arrested. One of those Porter associates who got arrested was a dealer at this poker game, I am told. Another dealer who went by the name Bruce. And both of those guys obviously also got ensnared in this probe. And anyhow, when I showed my source to, again, fact check this profile, this Facebook profile of Amar Awadeh, what he immediately said without any knowledge of any of this episode. I didn't mention Mustafa Omar and how they're friends or anything. I showed him this photo and my source just immediately laughs over the phone. And he identifies him as, "Oh, yeah, I have stories about this guy." And what my source told me is that even after Amar was identified as being involved in the Jontae Porter investigation — remember, Jontae Porter was banned for life from the NBA as of April 2024 — Amar was still texting people trying to set up poker games. Quote from my source, "I do remember thinking, is he so arrogant that he thinks he's above this."

Pablo Torre: This takes us directly back to the phone call that Tom was having with the guy who loves Carmelo Anthony, who is Facebook friends with Amar, who had also just been telling you, Tom, I believe, the following about the Jontae Porter betting slip screenshot that he tweeted out back in January of 2024.

Mustafa Omar: Honestly, I don't know much about the slip. Like I said, it was just sent to me from someone, but...

Tom Haberstroh: So here, I had to do the most important thing in this conversation. I had to ask Moose about his connection to Amar directly.

Tom Haberstroh: Are you friends with or do you know Amar Awade?

Mustafa Omar: No.

Tom Haberstroh: No?

Mustafa Omar: No.

Tom Haberstroh: Okay, because I saw that you're Facebook friends with Amar, and so I figured maybe that was somehow you could, you were associated with him.

Mustafa Omar: No.

Pablo Torre: That's it. Just no. Like this guy's been super chatty this whole time. And when I bring up Amar Awadeh, just one word: no.

Pablo Torre: Which brings us back to the Facebook profile of Amar. Another photo that you can see on it at the top. The banner photo, it's a bit blurry. It's like someone is taking the photo from way back in the 300 section, and it's kind of zoomed in. At the center of this photo is a guy who looks like Amar standing courtside on the baseline at Madison Square Garden. And what's important here is that in this moment, this person is also dapping up a tall black dude dressed in all yellow, a yellow sweater with matching yellow shorts wearing a baseball cap. The photo was uploaded. You can see it on the Facebook profile. The photo was uploaded on April 23rd, 2024. So this is during the 2024 NBA playoffs. So what do you do? You go to the game logs. You go to Basketball Reference, Schedule and Results. You click just to see if the Knicks were playing any time around that date on April 23rd, 2024. And you can see on that date in the Knicks schedule, April 22nd, they beat the Philadelphia 76ers in an extremely dramatic game at the Garden.

Announcer: Hartenstein gets it out to Ananobi. DeVincenzo at three. Bang! Bang! Knicks take a one-point lead with 13 seconds remaining. The garden is shaking right now. What an incredible sequence. Rule of three. The rule of three.

Pablo Torre: So I just got to jump in here to point out that this game at Madison Square Garden happened five days after Jontae Porter got banned for life from the NBA. Which means that it also happened while the feds were actively investigating Amar Awade, who was standing right there, courtside, for his role in that same historic gambling scandal. And now, when you pull multiple angles on this specific play, what you can clearly see in retrospect is the identity of the tall black dude in all yellow. The same one Amar Awade is dapping up in his Facebook banner photo after arguably the greatest play in modern Knicks history. Because, of course, it's Moose's goat, Carmelo Anthony.

Tom Haberstroh: Amazing. He looks jubilant. He couldn't. It looks like he's the happiest day of his...

Pablo Torre: I mean, look, you can really appreciate, by the way, that just the thread count on this yellow sweater in this photograph and even on the broadcast, you can tell. This is, I mean, looking great.

Pablo Torre: All of which reminded us of something. Something we had found pretty early on in our search for any tweet that had tagged Moose_NBA. We had found an angle of this play, of the three, from the baseline shot off a cell phone and the video credit was, quote, "courtesy Moose_NBA."

Tom Haberstroh: Get the f*** out of here.

Pablo Torre: It's right there. Right there on the right side of your screen. This is the thing that hit us literally as we were sitting down to tape today. Now let's watch this same play from the Madison Square Garden camera that's looking straight out at the basket so you can see the full baseline and let's zoom in. Enhance. Give me a little bit more. Can we get a little bit more of a zoom there? Oh my. You see that? See the guy in blue right there?

Pablo Torre: And after countless more hours of Twitter and Facebook searching, we realized something. The guy sitting next to Amar Awade, who's pictured holding a cell phone, which I can only assume is the cell phone he used to shoot the video of that Dante DiVincenzo 3, had actually identified himself on Twitter by name as the guy who taped it and sent it to Moose_NBA. And we saw this because Cell Phone Guy, it turns out, was beefing with Barstool Sports, which had aggregated the video without giving either of them credit. And by now, as a student of the Rule of Three, Tom easily recognized Cell Phone Guy. He was a third person, we had noticed, while combing through various Facebook albums. A person better known as Amar's brother, Omar Awade.

Pablo Torre: And even though Moose denied even knowing Amar to Tom, we found more pictures, pictures of all three of these guys. Graduations, parties, weddings. We even found a video of Omar wearing a Sprewell jersey going to a Knicks game with Moose, who was wearing a Carmelo Anthony jersey that, by now, all of us had seen a lot.

Omar Awade: What's up, everybody? It's your boy Omar, the newest member of Spectators. On my way to the Knicks game, you see me decked out in the Sprewell. Had to do it to him. Magic is in town. Just smoked him by 30. About to smoke him by another 30. And I'm on the way. Come roll with me.

Pablo Torre: At which point, it became clear that Moose_NBA, Twitter's Malik Beasley Prophet, was more than just Facebook friends with alleged Jontae Porter co-conspirator Amar Awade. Moose was his relative, his cousin. Meaning, we had literally gone from Medea's family reunion to Mustafa's.

Pablo Torre: This is where it takes us back now to the legal documents as we try to connect all the dots here. Right, so generally observing the following in the Jontae Porter legal documents, quote, "A relative of the defendant Amar Awadei, whose identity is known to me, placed a ten thousand dollar parlay bet through betting company one on the under for player one's three pointers, assists, and steals." Goes on to talk about how the relative won eighty-five thousand dollars, netting a profit of $75,000. And so just saying that Amar Awaday, in terms of the information he was sharing, who he was bringing in to the thing he was already caught up in, we don't know which family member it is. They're anonymous, according to federal prosecutors. But family is literally mentioned in the federal investigation a number of times.

Tom Haberstroh: I had to follow up with Mustafa to make sure he had his story straight on this. So I asked him again.

Tom Haberstroh: You did not get information on Malik Beasley from Amar Awade, who is part of the Porter case.

Mustafa Omar: No. Like I said, I got it off of Reddit.

Tom Haberstroh: Do you have that Reddit forum that you got it from that you could show me?

Mustafa Omar: I could probably find it.

Tom Haberstroh: Yeah. Would you be fine with me searching it and then getting it to you on Twitter?

Mustafa Omar: Yeah, yeah. That'd be great.

Tom Haberstroh: All right. I'll do that, Tom.

Pablo Torre: Despite the preponderance of evidence from his own posts and his own brags to having a connection to someone in this, he claims zero knowledge and that he got it from, he got it from Reddit.

Tom Haberstroh: Yeah. He said he got it from Reddit and it was public. And after I hung up with Mustafa Omar, who promised me to hit me back on Twitter and send that Reddit post that would clear him of all of this and just say, "Hey, they had it. It wasn't me." What happened next was I logged back into my Twitter account and I DMed him back, a reminder being like, "Hey, yeah, if you can just grab that Reddit post and send it back to me." Bloop. I got an error message. And that error message said, "Message not sent. Sending direct message failed." I thought my internet was down or that he turned off his DMs, but nope, nope, guys. He had shut down his account. At 1-2-3-7-4-7-4-8-4-9-lowercase-A, we hardly knew ye. And so I was like, you know what? I'm going to check his Facebook profile. And guess what? That too, guys, was taken down seconds after we got off that phone. All of it, gone.

Pablo Torre: Unfortunately for Moose, we also love screenshots. So this is the part where we need to sort of like take a step back, maybe breathe, just think about what it is that we're finding out here today. Because the timeline has the Jontae Porter betting slip, right? This is now what Moose had posted. That was dated what, Tom?

Tom Haberstroh: The betting slip, if you look at it closely, it says January 22nd, 2024, okay?

Tom Haberstroh: The game won in the Jontae Porter case came four days later, January 26th. So that's important here because this actually predates that game one.

Which is to say, what we are circling here, what we've been exhaustively reporting here, actually is, ostensibly, an expansion of the scope that the Eastern District of New York, the U.S. Attorney's Office, had published, which started four days after this. But here we have all of these connections to indicate that actually the dude who's ensnared in that thing, Amar, is connected to the dude who posted this thing from four days before that.

So remember, we have the betting slip January 22nd. We have game one of this inquiry with the feds on January 26th. Then five days later, we get a flurry of unusual betting activity on Malik Beasley's unders for his two and a half rebounds at a sportsbook that flagged this to ESPN. So we have within less than 10 days, the betting slip, the first Jontae Porter game, and the Malik Beasley game.

We have to note the timeline here that this January 31st game is not like a random game in terms of the timeline of things. It puts it within basically a week. It's all when this stuff was happening. In our example, again, of the rule of three, this is how this all was unfolding.

What we've established in that timeline is that there are some things that are documented and undeniable and confirmed in terms of, yes, connecting, or at the very least, moving the dots close together. They're all conspicuously proximate to each other.

Pablo Torre: And by the way, we've also been making calls about Malik Beasley. Malik Beasley's attorney, Steve Haney. Tom, he did send us a statement, right?

Tom Haberstroh: Here's the statement from Steve Haney. "Presuming someone is guilty when they haven't been charged with the crime, let alone convicted, is a dangerous narrative. The mere allegations have caused irreparable harm to Malik's image, reputation, and career."

Pablo Torre: The note I want to get to at the end here, by the way, is that when it comes to, so what explains all of this, right? Our investigation continues. It does. It continues because we have reason to believe that these are not coincidences, that these are connections.

We have reason to believe that when it comes to unusual betting action coming in on an under, Malik Beasley winds up hitting the over pretty hard through his level of hunger in play. But you also have Moose and Amar and this Facebook friendship and these details and these pictures courtside that...

We should not say what we are tempted to, but we should present, in the words of Denzel Washington in *Two Guns*, one thing might be important for everybody going forward. "Tell us about your trip. Lawyer. What's the big deal? Lawyer. Doesn't the DA know about you and Poppy Greco? Lawyer. Lawyer. They know you were at his ranch. I know I need a lawyer."

And on that note, this is where I should probably mention that the lawyer for Amar Awade, who is currently on house arrest, declined comment to PTFO. As did the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York, which is an entity that I now wonder about, too.

Because what I found out today is that our moose hunt has actually expanded the FBI's scope of the Jontae Porter scandal, the betting scandal, beyond what the government itself has been able to publicly establish, at least. And we have connected it now to the prophecy of the Malik Beasley investigation. If not Malik Beasley, noted garbage time God, himself.

But maybe my biggest takeaway here, as we try to square that particular circle, concerns what it really takes to investigate a scandal like this in the age of legalized sports gambling. And legalized sports gambling is obviously everywhere now. DraftKings was the sponsor of this show for the first year and a half of our existence. They remain the major partner to Meadowlark Media. And to their credit, by the way, they want to catch bad actors. They are incentivized to try and flag those suspicious bits of betting activity. That's how a lot of this stuff is being caught in real time.

And yet, this age has spawned a wave of conflicting incentives and new vulnerabilities. And this general confluence, in the words of Moose's Discord, of hoops, gambling, and crypto. Which means that I am left here at the end, presenting my internet-brained, exhausted friends, Tom and Amin, with a disturbing truth about ourselves.

The characters everybody needed to study this entire time. We're on the place that we all say we want to leave. But clearly haven't. NBA Twitter.

*The Godfather Part III*. Every time I think I'm out, they pull me back in. The rule of *The Godfather Part III*.

This has been *Pablo Torre Finds Out*, a Meadowlark Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.

[Music fades in]

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