April 22, 2025 • 11 mins
George Noory and author Brian Tuohy explore his research into game fixing in professional sports, if sports leagues manipulate their games to boost ratings, and if honest players know when their teammates are cheating.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with you.
Brian Towey with US America's leading expert on game fixing
and sports, and is recognized as a scholarly authority by
the United States Supreme Court. He has worked with the
Center for Investigative Reporting to produce an article for Sports Illustrated,
has been a guest on more than two hundred and
(00:26):
fifty national and local radio programs, as well as spoken
at the Walter Kronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State
University and Columbia College in Chicago. His latest book is
called The Fix Is Still In Brian, welcome to the program.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
Good evening, George, How are you great.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
How big an industry is sports betting? It seems to
be growing.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Oh it is.
Speaker 4 (00:52):
I mean it's a very corporate world. It's a multi
billion dollar industry. The scary thing is is nobody really
was how much money is bet on sports in the
United States around the world, because the vast majority of
it is still done through illegal websites, through illegal bookmakers.
So we know, you know, on one hand, how much
(01:13):
is being bet legally but being bet across the board
on all sports. Nobody really knows. It's literally hundreds of
billions of dollars that are bet on sports every year.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Yeah, I mean years ago, the mob used to control
all of it, didn't they.
Speaker 4 (01:27):
For the most part, Yes, they were. That was really
one of their biggest money makers. That and actually the
loan sharking that went along with it to losing better.
So you know, they would book your bets and you
would lose, and then you would borrow money from the
mob to pay back the mob basically.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
So yeah, it was.
Speaker 4 (01:43):
It was a great, great business practice for you know,
illegal gambling organization crime.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
Yeah, then they.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Broke your arm or leg or it even worse if
you could pay them.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
Back, Yeah, exactly. That was that was their motive.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
How did you get involved in investigating sports betting?
Speaker 4 (02:03):
Well, it kind of fell into it accidentally in a way.
I mean I wrote my original book that fixes in
back in twenty ten, and I kind of discovered really
on accident that no one seemed to be looking at
this subject matter. They didn't seem to be looking too
hard at sports gambling the United States because it was
really completely illegal outside of Nevada, and so because it
(02:26):
was an unexplored space, I kind of stepped in and
filled that void and started looking into it and seeing
what was really going on. And you know, it seemed
like there was a lot of corruption that was being
overlooked by the mainstream sports media.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
And when you say, Brian, the fixes in what do
you mean by that?
Speaker 4 (02:44):
Well, I kind of look at game fixing from two angles.
One is the conspiracy side of it, where I believe
the sports leagues manipulate their own games for television purposes
and for ratings to get people to watch more. But
also from the angle of sports gambling, where you know, mobsters,
gamblers pay people, bribe people to fix the outcome of games,
(03:08):
whether it's point shaving in basketball or football, or across
the world game fixing in soccer and cricket and all
these other sports.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Roughly, how many sports figures that are out there do
you think are involved in this?
Speaker 4 (03:24):
It's really hard to say. If you want to talk
about the gambling aspect of it. We know for a
fact that just to probably maybe ten years ago, at
least fifty countries around the world fifty five to zero
had active investigations into game fixing and sport. I mean,
(03:45):
you look at India with the India Premier League and
cricket that is known to be corrupt from literally top
to bottom, from the ownership of the league all the
way down to the players, referees, coaches, what have you.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
You look at Serie A Soccer.
Speaker 4 (03:59):
Which is the basically the NFL of Italy, and we
know that league is corrupt from top to bottom. We
know games have been fixed in soccer and La Liga
in Spain. We know Bundesliga games in Germany. Soccer has
been fixed. We know you know, Chinese baseball games have
been fixed. We know you know, games have been fixed
supposedly all over the world in so many different countries
(04:20):
and continue to be you know, attacked by these game
fixing organizations. Yet somehow, in the United States we think
and believe that our games are untouchable for some reason.
And I find it funny that, you know, a crime
that exists all over the world, literally spanning the globe,
somehow does not exist in the United States. And I'd
like to, you know, somebody tell me another crime that's
(04:43):
global that does not.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
Also happen in the United States.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
Besides game fixing and brian to fix the game, do
you need participants on both sides, both teams.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
Oh no, not at all.
Speaker 4 (04:54):
In fact, you really if you wanted to look legitimate,
you really only need one side. I mean you think
of like a boxing match or a tennis match. You
don't want both participants involved in that game to be
in on the fix. You only need the one person.
You know, you only need the one boxer who's going
to take a dive, or the one, you know, a
tennis player who's going to keep hitting the ball into
(05:15):
the net and make all these unforced errors. But at
the same time, game pictures that have gotten so sophisticated,
especially some of these syndicates out of the Far East
that are fixing soccer matches around the world, they can
literally determine the outcome of soccer matches. They will literally
say we want this game to end three to one,
(05:38):
which means both teams are involved and the game will
end three to one. They will get the exact result
they're out to to bet on, and they will make
it happen. And they've done this repeatedly and it's been
proven that it's been done. It's not a conspiracy theory.
It's something that is literally people have been you know,
arrested for tried for it, and convicted for it. So
I mean, it's not a conspiracy theory to think that
(06:00):
games are being fixed worldwide right now today, because it
is happening.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Brian, is it obvious to an expert like yourself to
see somebody fix the game just by watching the game?
Speaker 3 (06:14):
You know, it can be.
Speaker 4 (06:15):
I mean some things, especially like like the Chinese Baseball
League for example, which is you know, obviously not a
big like Major League Baseball, but I mean they literally
have people yelling at players to miss you know, pop
ups and drop them because of the way they've fed
on games. You know, there's a like a soccer league
in Canada, which again is small potatoes, but they estimate
(06:38):
that somewhere around fifty percent of the games there are
being fixed by gamblers because who's you know, really paying
attention to Canadian soccer.
Speaker 3 (06:47):
No one.
Speaker 4 (06:47):
But at the same time, you know, it's funny you
read you go back through history, like Joe Namath back
in the late nineteen sixties was accused potentially of fixing
games because there's a couple of games during their Super
Bowl run back in nineteen sixty eight where Joe Ama
threw like five interceptions in the game, and he was,
you know, kind of approached saying, you know, geez, where
(07:08):
you're throwing these games? And he said, look, he goes,
if I was going to fix a game, I wouldn't make.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
It that obvious.
Speaker 4 (07:14):
You know, I would just barely miss a receiver, or
I would just lead a receiver in a certain way
right underthrow pass whoever, he goes, I wouldn't throw five interceptions.
I wouldn't make it that blatant. And so I mean,
there are very subtle ways of fixing these matches.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
And even you go back further.
Speaker 4 (07:30):
Lefty Rosenthal, who the character of Ace Rothstein in the
Martin Scarcese film Casino was based on Lefty left He
used to pay college players to practice missing layups, so
when he was fixing college basketball games, the kids would
do it so convincingly nobody would necessarily notice what was
going on.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
Well with Brian Toy, his latest book is called The
Fix is Still In More corruption and consequences that the
pro sports leagues don't want you to know about. Who
in the industry has been your influence?
Speaker 4 (08:07):
Well, my two probably biggest influences in the getting in
of this was one what's a guy by the name
of Dan Moldea and some of your listeners may know
of him. He wrote about the rfk assassination, and he
wrote about Jimmie Hoffa, Jimmy Hoffe yes and an organized crime.
But he also wrote a book called Interference, How Organized
Crime Influences the NFL, And that was a big influence
(08:30):
to me because you know, the NFL states in its
one hundred plus year history now that they've never once, never, once,
according to the NFL, had a game fixed by organized
crime or gamblers or by anybody. And Moldea, through his
research that identified I think over seventy games that were
likely fixed exactly by organized crime or gamblers that the
(08:50):
NFL says has never happened. And his book came out
in the late nineteen eighties, might have been like Ground
eighty nine. And to me it was really eye opening
and shocking because this was the sort of thing that
most sports writers never talked about. You know, you would
read books about sports like I did growing up, and
it'd always be this raw ros stuff and all, wasn't
this a funny story? Or look what happened in the
(09:11):
locker room, and then there'd be like two pages of
you know, something really bizarre, like you know, the Dallas
Cowboys had this you know, cocaine and stripper party that
went on for weeks at a time and whatever, and
then it would be kind of ignored and go back
to the raw ross stuff. And well, Dya wrote about
you know, these kind of corruption things and this investigative
stuff that nobody ever seemed to touch on. So that
(09:33):
was an influence for me. And another book was written
by all his name scaped me Bernie Parish, and Bernie
was a former player for the Cleveland Browns and went
on to be a long time participant in the NFL
Players Association their union, and his book, which was written
around nineteen seventy seventy one something like that, called they
(09:55):
Call It a Game. He wrote how he believed when
the big networks like CBS bought into the NFL, he
felt like they actually kind of almost purchased the league
and turned it from being football into a television show.
And he kind of questioned legitimacy of a lot of games,
including Super Bowl three. And I kind of put those
two ideas together that maybe the league and the television
(10:18):
networks are manipulating games in a certain way, and then
you have this organized crime and mob influence on the NFL,
and it maybe really wonder what's going on professional sports
these days.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Do there's straight players Brian, the good ones who don't fix,
who don't shave. Do they know when one of their
teammates may be doing this? Oh?
Speaker 3 (10:38):
I think so.
Speaker 4 (10:39):
I think it's it's obvious to somebody on the inside.
I mean, I think players are more aware of things
than we give them credit for. I think you know,
you hear a lot of times players and coaches will
complain about, for example, the officiating, whether it's in an
NFL game or an NBA game, and you know, to
do so these days you could find for it, you
(11:00):
get penalized by the league. So they try to actually
shut the players up right from the get go. But
still there's certain times when you clearly hear them talking
about stuff where especially like recently, for example, the Kansas
City Chiefs and they're run to their recent Super Bowls.
You know, players will openly say, we're not just playing
the Chiefs. We're playing the Chiefs and the referees, and
(11:22):
we have to be both in order to win the game.
And you know, I'm sure that's something in the NFL
doesn't want widely spread, but the players are not dummies.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one am Eastern, and go to Coast to coastam dot
com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with you.
Brian Towey with US America's leading expert on game fixing
and sports, and is recognized as a scholarly authority by
the United States Supreme Court. He has worked with the
Center for Investigative Reporting to produce an article for Sports Illustrated,
has been a guest on more than two hundred and
(00:26):
fifty national and local radio programs, as well as spoken
at the Walter Kronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State
University and Columbia College in Chicago. His latest book is
called The Fix Is Still In Brian, welcome to the program.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
Good evening, George, How are you great.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
How big an industry is sports betting? It seems to
be growing.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Oh it is.
Speaker 4 (00:52):
I mean it's a very corporate world. It's a multi
billion dollar industry. The scary thing is is nobody really
was how much money is bet on sports in the
United States around the world, because the vast majority of
it is still done through illegal websites, through illegal bookmakers.
So we know, you know, on one hand, how much
(01:13):
is being bet legally but being bet across the board
on all sports. Nobody really knows. It's literally hundreds of
billions of dollars that are bet on sports every year.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Yeah, I mean years ago, the mob used to control
all of it, didn't they.
Speaker 4 (01:27):
For the most part, Yes, they were. That was really
one of their biggest money makers. That and actually the
loan sharking that went along with it to losing better.
So you know, they would book your bets and you
would lose, and then you would borrow money from the
mob to pay back the mob basically.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
So yeah, it was.
Speaker 4 (01:43):
It was a great, great business practice for you know,
illegal gambling organization crime.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
Yeah, then they.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Broke your arm or leg or it even worse if
you could pay them.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
Back, Yeah, exactly. That was that was their motive.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
How did you get involved in investigating sports betting?
Speaker 4 (02:03):
Well, it kind of fell into it accidentally in a way.
I mean I wrote my original book that fixes in
back in twenty ten, and I kind of discovered really
on accident that no one seemed to be looking at
this subject matter. They didn't seem to be looking too
hard at sports gambling the United States because it was
really completely illegal outside of Nevada, and so because it
(02:26):
was an unexplored space, I kind of stepped in and
filled that void and started looking into it and seeing
what was really going on. And you know, it seemed
like there was a lot of corruption that was being
overlooked by the mainstream sports media.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
And when you say, Brian, the fixes in what do
you mean by that?
Speaker 4 (02:44):
Well, I kind of look at game fixing from two angles.
One is the conspiracy side of it, where I believe
the sports leagues manipulate their own games for television purposes
and for ratings to get people to watch more. But
also from the angle of sports gambling, where you know, mobsters,
gamblers pay people, bribe people to fix the outcome of games,
(03:08):
whether it's point shaving in basketball or football, or across
the world game fixing in soccer and cricket and all
these other sports.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Roughly, how many sports figures that are out there do
you think are involved in this?
Speaker 4 (03:24):
It's really hard to say. If you want to talk
about the gambling aspect of it. We know for a
fact that just to probably maybe ten years ago, at
least fifty countries around the world fifty five to zero
had active investigations into game fixing and sport. I mean,
(03:45):
you look at India with the India Premier League and
cricket that is known to be corrupt from literally top
to bottom, from the ownership of the league all the
way down to the players, referees, coaches, what have you.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
You look at Serie A Soccer.
Speaker 4 (03:59):
Which is the basically the NFL of Italy, and we
know that league is corrupt from top to bottom. We
know games have been fixed in soccer and La Liga
in Spain. We know Bundesliga games in Germany. Soccer has
been fixed. We know you know, Chinese baseball games have
been fixed. We know you know, games have been fixed
supposedly all over the world in so many different countries
(04:20):
and continue to be you know, attacked by these game
fixing organizations. Yet somehow, in the United States we think
and believe that our games are untouchable for some reason.
And I find it funny that, you know, a crime
that exists all over the world, literally spanning the globe,
somehow does not exist in the United States. And I'd
like to, you know, somebody tell me another crime that's
(04:43):
global that does not.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
Also happen in the United States.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
Besides game fixing and brian to fix the game, do
you need participants on both sides, both teams.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
Oh no, not at all.
Speaker 4 (04:54):
In fact, you really if you wanted to look legitimate,
you really only need one side. I mean you think
of like a boxing match or a tennis match. You
don't want both participants involved in that game to be
in on the fix. You only need the one person.
You know, you only need the one boxer who's going
to take a dive, or the one, you know, a
tennis player who's going to keep hitting the ball into
(05:15):
the net and make all these unforced errors. But at
the same time, game pictures that have gotten so sophisticated,
especially some of these syndicates out of the Far East
that are fixing soccer matches around the world, they can
literally determine the outcome of soccer matches. They will literally
say we want this game to end three to one,
(05:38):
which means both teams are involved and the game will
end three to one. They will get the exact result
they're out to to bet on, and they will make
it happen. And they've done this repeatedly and it's been
proven that it's been done. It's not a conspiracy theory.
It's something that is literally people have been you know,
arrested for tried for it, and convicted for it. So
I mean, it's not a conspiracy theory to think that
(06:00):
games are being fixed worldwide right now today, because it
is happening.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Brian, is it obvious to an expert like yourself to
see somebody fix the game just by watching the game?
Speaker 3 (06:14):
You know, it can be.
Speaker 4 (06:15):
I mean some things, especially like like the Chinese Baseball
League for example, which is you know, obviously not a
big like Major League Baseball, but I mean they literally
have people yelling at players to miss you know, pop
ups and drop them because of the way they've fed
on games. You know, there's a like a soccer league
in Canada, which again is small potatoes, but they estimate
(06:38):
that somewhere around fifty percent of the games there are
being fixed by gamblers because who's you know, really paying
attention to Canadian soccer.
Speaker 3 (06:47):
No one.
Speaker 4 (06:47):
But at the same time, you know, it's funny you
read you go back through history, like Joe Namath back
in the late nineteen sixties was accused potentially of fixing
games because there's a couple of games during their Super
Bowl run back in nineteen sixty eight where Joe Ama
threw like five interceptions in the game, and he was,
you know, kind of approached saying, you know, geez, where
(07:08):
you're throwing these games? And he said, look, he goes,
if I was going to fix a game, I wouldn't make.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
It that obvious.
Speaker 4 (07:14):
You know, I would just barely miss a receiver, or
I would just lead a receiver in a certain way
right underthrow pass whoever, he goes, I wouldn't throw five interceptions.
I wouldn't make it that blatant. And so I mean,
there are very subtle ways of fixing these matches.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
And even you go back further.
Speaker 4 (07:30):
Lefty Rosenthal, who the character of Ace Rothstein in the
Martin Scarcese film Casino was based on Lefty left He
used to pay college players to practice missing layups, so
when he was fixing college basketball games, the kids would
do it so convincingly nobody would necessarily notice what was
going on.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
Well with Brian Toy, his latest book is called The
Fix is Still In More corruption and consequences that the
pro sports leagues don't want you to know about. Who
in the industry has been your influence?
Speaker 4 (08:07):
Well, my two probably biggest influences in the getting in
of this was one what's a guy by the name
of Dan Moldea and some of your listeners may know
of him. He wrote about the rfk assassination, and he
wrote about Jimmie Hoffa, Jimmy Hoffe yes and an organized crime.
But he also wrote a book called Interference, How Organized
Crime Influences the NFL, And that was a big influence
(08:30):
to me because you know, the NFL states in its
one hundred plus year history now that they've never once, never, once,
according to the NFL, had a game fixed by organized
crime or gamblers or by anybody. And Moldea, through his
research that identified I think over seventy games that were
likely fixed exactly by organized crime or gamblers that the
(08:50):
NFL says has never happened. And his book came out
in the late nineteen eighties, might have been like Ground
eighty nine. And to me it was really eye opening
and shocking because this was the sort of thing that
most sports writers never talked about. You know, you would
read books about sports like I did growing up, and
it'd always be this raw ros stuff and all, wasn't
this a funny story? Or look what happened in the
(09:11):
locker room, and then there'd be like two pages of
you know, something really bizarre, like you know, the Dallas
Cowboys had this you know, cocaine and stripper party that
went on for weeks at a time and whatever, and
then it would be kind of ignored and go back
to the raw ross stuff. And well, Dya wrote about
you know, these kind of corruption things and this investigative
stuff that nobody ever seemed to touch on. So that
(09:33):
was an influence for me. And another book was written
by all his name scaped me Bernie Parish, and Bernie
was a former player for the Cleveland Browns and went
on to be a long time participant in the NFL
Players Association their union, and his book, which was written
around nineteen seventy seventy one something like that, called they
(09:55):
Call It a Game. He wrote how he believed when
the big networks like CBS bought into the NFL, he
felt like they actually kind of almost purchased the league
and turned it from being football into a television show.
And he kind of questioned legitimacy of a lot of games,
including Super Bowl three. And I kind of put those
two ideas together that maybe the league and the television
(10:18):
networks are manipulating games in a certain way, and then
you have this organized crime and mob influence on the NFL,
and it maybe really wonder what's going on professional sports
these days.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Do there's straight players Brian, the good ones who don't fix,
who don't shave. Do they know when one of their
teammates may be doing this? Oh?
Speaker 3 (10:38):
I think so.
Speaker 4 (10:39):
I think it's it's obvious to somebody on the inside.
I mean, I think players are more aware of things
than we give them credit for. I think you know,
you hear a lot of times players and coaches will
complain about, for example, the officiating, whether it's in an
NFL game or an NBA game, and you know, to
do so these days you could find for it, you
(11:00):
get penalized by the league. So they try to actually
shut the players up right from the get go. But
still there's certain times when you clearly hear them talking
about stuff where especially like recently, for example, the Kansas
City Chiefs and they're run to their recent Super Bowls.
You know, players will openly say, we're not just playing
the Chiefs. We're playing the Chiefs and the referees, and
(11:22):
we have to be both in order to win the game.
And you know, I'm sure that's something in the NFL
doesn't want widely spread, but the players are not dummies.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one am Eastern, and go to Coast to coastam dot
com for more
The Best of Coast to Coast AM News
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George Noory
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