New York
Court papers say ex-NBA player laid out betting scheme in a text; 6th person arrested
NEW YORK (AP) — A sixth person was charged Monday in the federal sports betting case involving ex-NBA player Jontay Porter, and authorities disclosed a text message Porter allegedly sent explaining how to cash in on his plans to bench himself in a January 2024 game.
The former Toronto Raptors center already has pleaded guilty in the criminal case and was banned from the NBA for life. He admitted that he agreed to withdraw early from games, claiming illness or injury, so that those in the know could win big by betting on him to underperform expectations.
Although the new developments don’t affect the legal case against Porter, they put the scheme in what a court document says were his own words.
“Hit unders for the big numbers,” Porter wrote to an alleged conspirator on Jan. 26, 2024, according to a court complaint against yet another alleged schemer, Shane Hennen. He was arrested Sunday at the Las Vegas airport while boarding a flight to Panama.
“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,” Porter wrote, according to the complaint. It identifies him only as “NBA Player 1” but makes clear through references — such as the details of his guilty plea last year — that it’s Porter.
He had scratched an eye during a game on Jan. 22, 2024, keeping conspirators in the loop by text even from the arena, according to the complaint. But he wasn’t on the injured list when the Raptors faced the LA Clippers four days later.
Porter ultimately played about 4 1/2 minutes in that game before saying he had aggravated the eye problem. Then he pulled out of a March 20 game against the Sacramento Kings after less than three minutes, saying he felt ill. His performance in both games fell well below what sportsbooks had anticipated.
Porter told a court in July that he got involved in the plot to try to clear his own gambling debts. He’s set to be sentenced in May. He could face anything from no jail time to 20 years behind bars; prosecutors have estimated his sentence at about 3 1/2 to four years in prison.
A message was sent to his lawyer Monday to seek comment on the developments.
Hennen was released without bail after his arraignment Monday in Las Vegas on charges including wire fraud conspiracy. The court complaint alleges that he placed bets through proxies after co-conspirators alerted him to Porter’s plans for the Jan. 26 game, and that he also got a heads-up about the March 20 game and likely told other gamblers about it.
A message seeking comment was sent to his attorney.
Besides Hennen and Porter, four other people also have been charged to date. Two have pleaded guilty, a third has pleaded not guilty, and the fourth hasn’t entered a plea.
The complaint against Hennen alleges there were still more conspirators involved. It’s unclear whether more people may yet be arrested.
Virginia
Firm has no plans to salvage more Titanic artifacts, shelving legal fight
NORFOLK, Va. (AP) — The U.S. government has scrapped its litigation against the company that owns the salvage rights to the Titanic, noting that the firm no longer has dive plans to the shipwreck that could break federal law.
The scuttling of the government’s latest legal battle isn’t necessarily the end of RMS Titanic Inc.’s attempts to enter the rapidly deteriorating ocean liner or to fetch more historic objects. The company said last month that it’s still considering the implications of future expeditions.
But the U.S. on Friday withdrew its motion to intervene in a federal admiralty court in Virginia, which oversees salvage matters for the world’s most famous shipwreck. The withdrawal concluded the second of two legal battles in five years that the U.S. has waged against RMST, which also exhibits the artifacts.
The U.S. filed its latest legal challenge in 2023 when RMST was planning to take images inside the ship’s hull and pluck items from the surrounding debris field. RMST also said it would possibly recover freestanding objects from the room where the ocean liner broadcast its distress calls.
The U.S. argued that entering the hull — or disturbing the wreck — would violate a 2017 federal law and a corresponding agreement with Great Britain. Both regard the site as a hallowed memorial to the more than 1,500 people who died when the ship struck an iceberg in 1912.
RMST ultimately scaled back its dive plans, stating that it would only take external images. The change followed the 2023 implosion of the Titan submersible, which killed RMST’s director of underwater research Paul-Henri Nargeolet and four others onboard.
The experimental Titan craft was operated by a separate company, OceanGate, to which Nargeolet was lending his expertise. He was supposed to lead the RMST expedition.
After RMST revised its dive plans, the U.S. stopped trying to block that particular expedition, which produced detailed images of the wreck in September. But the government told the federal court in Norfolk last year that it wanted to leave the door open to challenging subsequent expeditions.
RMST, however, told the court in December that it won’t visit the wreck in 2025 and hasn’t settled on any plans for future expeditions. The company said it will continue to “diligently consider the strategic, legal, and financial implications of conducting future salvage operations at the site.”
In response, the U.S. withdrew its motion to intervene.
“Should future circumstances warrant, the United States will file a new motion to intervene based on the facts then existing,” the government wrote in a filing on Friday.
RMST has been the court-recognized steward of Titanic artifacts since it won salvage rights to the ship in 1994. The firm has recovered and conserved thousands of items, from silverware to a piece of the ship’s hull, which millions of people have seen through exhibits.
The company’s last expedition to recover artifacts was in 2010, before the federal law and international agreement took effect.
The first federal enforcement was in 2020, when RMST wanted to retrieve and exhibit the radio that broadcast the Titanic’s distress calls.
U.S. District Judge Rebecca Beach Smith, who presides over Titanic salvage matters, gave RMST permission. But the U.S. government swiftly challenged the plan. The legal battle never played out because RMST indefinitely delayed the expedition in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
Smith noted during a court hearing in March that time may be running out for expeditions inside the Titanic. The ship is rapidly deteriorating on the North Atlantic seabed.
Louisiana
Man charged with murder in stabbing deaths of his son, sister and nephew
AMITE, La. (AP) — A Louisiana man who was arrested for the fatal stabbings of a woman and two children was being treated for schizophrenia and started hearing voices the day before, a relative said.
The 30-year-old Amite man was arrested on three counts of first-degree murder after the Thursday killings. Family members identified the victims as the suspect’s son, 1-year-old Hayden Madison; his sister, 40-year-old Rhonda Powell; and Powell’s son, 10-year-old Braylon Powell.
The suspect remained jailed in St. Helena Parish on Saturday, and a sheriff’s dispatcher said she did not know whether he had seen a judge or had a lawyer.
The parish Sheriff’s Office said all three were dead when deputies arrived.
The suspect and his son were living with Powell according to cousin Deondra Robertson-Warner, who told WBRZ-TV that the day before the stabbings, relatives took him to a hospital after he started hearing voices.
However, the hospital gave him a different kind of medication than he normally gets, Robertson-Warner said, and refused to commit him to inpatient psychiatric treatment despite requests by relatives who said he was acting aggressively.
“No one in that home survived because the mental health system failed him,” Robertson-Warner told WAFB-TV. “Had he been committed, he would be where he needed to be today, and my other family members would be alive.”
Indiana
Texas man charged with stalking WNBA star Caitlin Clark
Authorities in Indianapolis have charged a 55-year-old Texas man with felony stalking of Indiana Fever star and WNBA rookie of the year Caitlin Clark.
Michael Thomas Lewis is accused of repeated and continued harassment of the 22-year-old Clark beginning on Dec. 16, the Marion County prosecutor’s office wrote in a court filing Saturday. Jail records show Lewis is due in court on Tuesday.
Lewis posted numerous messages on Clark’s X account, according to an affidavit from a Marion County sheriff’s lieutenant.
In one, he said he had been driving by the Gainbridge Fieldhouse — one of the arenas where the Fever plays home games — three times day, and in another he said he had “one foot on a banana peel and the other on a stalking charge.” Other messages directed at Clark were sexually explicit.
The posts “actually caused Caitlin Clark to feel terrorized, frightened, intimidated, or threatened” and an implicit or explicit threat also was made “with the intent to place Caitlin Clark in reasonable fear of sexual battery,” prosecutors wrote in the Marion County Superior Court filing.
The FBI learned that the X account belonged to Lewis and that the messages were sent from IP addresses associated with an Indianapolis hotel and downtown public library.
Indianapolis police spoke with Lewis on Jan. 8 at his hotel room. He told officers he was in Indianapolis on vacation. When asked why he was making so many posts about Clark, Lewis replied: “Just the same reason everybody makes posts,” according to court documents.
He told police that he didn’t mean any harm and that he fantasized about being in a relationship with Clark.
“It’s an imagination, fantasy type thing and it’s a joke, and it’s nothing to do with threatening,” he told police, according to the court documents.
In asking the court for a higher than standard bond, the prosecutor’s office said Lewis traveled from his home in Texas to Indianapolis “with the intent to be in close proximity to the victim.”
The prosecutor’s office also sought a stay-away order as a specific condition if Lewis is released from jail ahead of trial. Prosecutors requested that Lewis be ordered to stay away from the Gainbridge and Hinkle fieldhouses where the Fever play home games.
The Associated Press was unable to determine Monday if Lewis has a lawyer who can comment on his behalf.
Fever officials have not responded to an Associated Press request for comment.
The Associated Press named Clark the Female Athlete of the Year for 2024. After leading Iowa to last year’s national championship game, she was the top pick in the WNBA draft and went on to win rookie of the year honors in the league.
Court papers say ex-NBA player laid out betting scheme in a text; 6th person arrested
NEW YORK (AP) — A sixth person was charged Monday in the federal sports betting case involving ex-NBA player Jontay Porter, and authorities disclosed a text message Porter allegedly sent explaining how to cash in on his plans to bench himself in a January 2024 game.
The former Toronto Raptors center already has pleaded guilty in the criminal case and was banned from the NBA for life. He admitted that he agreed to withdraw early from games, claiming illness or injury, so that those in the know could win big by betting on him to underperform expectations.
Although the new developments don’t affect the legal case against Porter, they put the scheme in what a court document says were his own words.
“Hit unders for the big numbers,” Porter wrote to an alleged conspirator on Jan. 26, 2024, according to a court complaint against yet another alleged schemer, Shane Hennen. He was arrested Sunday at the Las Vegas airport while boarding a flight to Panama.
“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,” Porter wrote, according to the complaint. It identifies him only as “NBA Player 1” but makes clear through references — such as the details of his guilty plea last year — that it’s Porter.
He had scratched an eye during a game on Jan. 22, 2024, keeping conspirators in the loop by text even from the arena, according to the complaint. But he wasn’t on the injured list when the Raptors faced the LA Clippers four days later.
Porter ultimately played about 4 1/2 minutes in that game before saying he had aggravated the eye problem. Then he pulled out of a March 20 game against the Sacramento Kings after less than three minutes, saying he felt ill. His performance in both games fell well below what sportsbooks had anticipated.
Porter told a court in July that he got involved in the plot to try to clear his own gambling debts. He’s set to be sentenced in May. He could face anything from no jail time to 20 years behind bars; prosecutors have estimated his sentence at about 3 1/2 to four years in prison.
A message was sent to his lawyer Monday to seek comment on the developments.
Hennen was released without bail after his arraignment Monday in Las Vegas on charges including wire fraud conspiracy. The court complaint alleges that he placed bets through proxies after co-conspirators alerted him to Porter’s plans for the Jan. 26 game, and that he also got a heads-up about the March 20 game and likely told other gamblers about it.
A message seeking comment was sent to his attorney.
Besides Hennen and Porter, four other people also have been charged to date. Two have pleaded guilty, a third has pleaded not guilty, and the fourth hasn’t entered a plea.
The complaint against Hennen alleges there were still more conspirators involved. It’s unclear whether more people may yet be arrested.
Virginia
Firm has no plans to salvage more Titanic artifacts, shelving legal fight
NORFOLK, Va. (AP) — The U.S. government has scrapped its litigation against the company that owns the salvage rights to the Titanic, noting that the firm no longer has dive plans to the shipwreck that could break federal law.
The scuttling of the government’s latest legal battle isn’t necessarily the end of RMS Titanic Inc.’s attempts to enter the rapidly deteriorating ocean liner or to fetch more historic objects. The company said last month that it’s still considering the implications of future expeditions.
But the U.S. on Friday withdrew its motion to intervene in a federal admiralty court in Virginia, which oversees salvage matters for the world’s most famous shipwreck. The withdrawal concluded the second of two legal battles in five years that the U.S. has waged against RMST, which also exhibits the artifacts.
The U.S. filed its latest legal challenge in 2023 when RMST was planning to take images inside the ship’s hull and pluck items from the surrounding debris field. RMST also said it would possibly recover freestanding objects from the room where the ocean liner broadcast its distress calls.
The U.S. argued that entering the hull — or disturbing the wreck — would violate a 2017 federal law and a corresponding agreement with Great Britain. Both regard the site as a hallowed memorial to the more than 1,500 people who died when the ship struck an iceberg in 1912.
RMST ultimately scaled back its dive plans, stating that it would only take external images. The change followed the 2023 implosion of the Titan submersible, which killed RMST’s director of underwater research Paul-Henri Nargeolet and four others onboard.
The experimental Titan craft was operated by a separate company, OceanGate, to which Nargeolet was lending his expertise. He was supposed to lead the RMST expedition.
After RMST revised its dive plans, the U.S. stopped trying to block that particular expedition, which produced detailed images of the wreck in September. But the government told the federal court in Norfolk last year that it wanted to leave the door open to challenging subsequent expeditions.
RMST, however, told the court in December that it won’t visit the wreck in 2025 and hasn’t settled on any plans for future expeditions. The company said it will continue to “diligently consider the strategic, legal, and financial implications of conducting future salvage operations at the site.”
In response, the U.S. withdrew its motion to intervene.
“Should future circumstances warrant, the United States will file a new motion to intervene based on the facts then existing,” the government wrote in a filing on Friday.
RMST has been the court-recognized steward of Titanic artifacts since it won salvage rights to the ship in 1994. The firm has recovered and conserved thousands of items, from silverware to a piece of the ship’s hull, which millions of people have seen through exhibits.
The company’s last expedition to recover artifacts was in 2010, before the federal law and international agreement took effect.
The first federal enforcement was in 2020, when RMST wanted to retrieve and exhibit the radio that broadcast the Titanic’s distress calls.
U.S. District Judge Rebecca Beach Smith, who presides over Titanic salvage matters, gave RMST permission. But the U.S. government swiftly challenged the plan. The legal battle never played out because RMST indefinitely delayed the expedition in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
Smith noted during a court hearing in March that time may be running out for expeditions inside the Titanic. The ship is rapidly deteriorating on the North Atlantic seabed.
Louisiana
Man charged with murder in stabbing deaths of his son, sister and nephew
AMITE, La. (AP) — A Louisiana man who was arrested for the fatal stabbings of a woman and two children was being treated for schizophrenia and started hearing voices the day before, a relative said.
The 30-year-old Amite man was arrested on three counts of first-degree murder after the Thursday killings. Family members identified the victims as the suspect’s son, 1-year-old Hayden Madison; his sister, 40-year-old Rhonda Powell; and Powell’s son, 10-year-old Braylon Powell.
The suspect remained jailed in St. Helena Parish on Saturday, and a sheriff’s dispatcher said she did not know whether he had seen a judge or had a lawyer.
The parish Sheriff’s Office said all three were dead when deputies arrived.
The suspect and his son were living with Powell according to cousin Deondra Robertson-Warner, who told WBRZ-TV that the day before the stabbings, relatives took him to a hospital after he started hearing voices.
However, the hospital gave him a different kind of medication than he normally gets, Robertson-Warner said, and refused to commit him to inpatient psychiatric treatment despite requests by relatives who said he was acting aggressively.
“No one in that home survived because the mental health system failed him,” Robertson-Warner told WAFB-TV. “Had he been committed, he would be where he needed to be today, and my other family members would be alive.”
Indiana
Texas man charged with stalking WNBA star Caitlin Clark
Authorities in Indianapolis have charged a 55-year-old Texas man with felony stalking of Indiana Fever star and WNBA rookie of the year Caitlin Clark.
Michael Thomas Lewis is accused of repeated and continued harassment of the 22-year-old Clark beginning on Dec. 16, the Marion County prosecutor’s office wrote in a court filing Saturday. Jail records show Lewis is due in court on Tuesday.
Lewis posted numerous messages on Clark’s X account, according to an affidavit from a Marion County sheriff’s lieutenant.
In one, he said he had been driving by the Gainbridge Fieldhouse — one of the arenas where the Fever plays home games — three times day, and in another he said he had “one foot on a banana peel and the other on a stalking charge.” Other messages directed at Clark were sexually explicit.
The posts “actually caused Caitlin Clark to feel terrorized, frightened, intimidated, or threatened” and an implicit or explicit threat also was made “with the intent to place Caitlin Clark in reasonable fear of sexual battery,” prosecutors wrote in the Marion County Superior Court filing.
The FBI learned that the X account belonged to Lewis and that the messages were sent from IP addresses associated with an Indianapolis hotel and downtown public library.
Indianapolis police spoke with Lewis on Jan. 8 at his hotel room. He told officers he was in Indianapolis on vacation. When asked why he was making so many posts about Clark, Lewis replied: “Just the same reason everybody makes posts,” according to court documents.
He told police that he didn’t mean any harm and that he fantasized about being in a relationship with Clark.
“It’s an imagination, fantasy type thing and it’s a joke, and it’s nothing to do with threatening,” he told police, according to the court documents.
In asking the court for a higher than standard bond, the prosecutor’s office said Lewis traveled from his home in Texas to Indianapolis “with the intent to be in close proximity to the victim.”
The prosecutor’s office also sought a stay-away order as a specific condition if Lewis is released from jail ahead of trial. Prosecutors requested that Lewis be ordered to stay away from the Gainbridge and Hinkle fieldhouses where the Fever play home games.
The Associated Press was unable to determine Monday if Lewis has a lawyer who can comment on his behalf.
Fever officials have not responded to an Associated Press request for comment.
The Associated Press named Clark the Female Athlete of the Year for 2024. After leading Iowa to last year’s national championship game, she was the top pick in the WNBA draft and went on to win rookie of the year honors in the league.
