Benny Silman of New York City is a former student turned campus bookmaker who was jailed for masterminding a point shaving scandal at Arizona State University.
In organized sports, point shaving is a type of match fixing where the perpetrators try to change the final score of a game without the intention of changing who wins. This is typically done by players colluding with gamblers to prevent a team from covering a published point spread, where gamblers bet on the margin of victory. The practice of shaving points is illegal in some countries, and stiff penalties are imposed for those caught and convicted, including jail time.
Anthony Jerome "Spud" Webb is an American former professional basketball player. A 5 ft 6 in (168 cm) point guard, Webb played college basketball at Midland College and at North Carolina State University. He then played for four teams in the National Basketball Association (NBA) in a professional career that spanned from 1985 to 1998. Webb also played professional basketball in the United States Basketball League, in the Continental Basketball Association, and in Italy.
Cornelius Lance "Connie" Hawkins was an American professional basketball player. A New York City playground legend, "the Hawk" was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1992.
Ralph Milton Beard Jr. was an American collegiate and professional basketball player. He won two NCAA national basketball championships at the University of Kentucky and played two years in the National Basketball Association prior to being barred for life for his participation in the 1951 point shaving scandal.
The 1950–51 NBA season was the fifth season of the National Basketball Association. The season ended with the Rochester Royals winning the NBA Championship, beating the New York Knicks 4 games to 3 in the NBA Finals.
The Dixie Classic was an annual college basketball tournament played from 1949 to 1960 in Reynolds Coliseum. The field consisted of the "Big Four" North Carolina schools, the host NC State Wolfpack, Duke Blue Devils, North Carolina Tar Heels, and Wake Forest Demon Deacons, and four teams from across the country.
Jacob Louis Molinas was an American professional basketball player, playing first for Columbia University, in New York City, and later briefly in the early National Basketball Association (NBA) with the Fort Wayne Pistons. He also played for multiple minor league franchises and teams after his brief NBA stint during the 1950s and early 1960s. During that period of time, he supposedly became an associate of the Genovese crime family due to his association with a couple of people there, and he later became a key figure in one of the most wide-reaching point shaving cheating scandals in college basketball history.
Eugene "Squeaky" Melchiorre was an American basketball player. A point guard, he was drafted by the Baltimore Bullets and was the first overall pick in the 1951 NBA draft. Melchiorre never played an NBA game due to his lifetime ban from the league for point shaving when he was a college player.
The 1978–79 Boston College basketball point-shaving scandal involved a scheme in which members of the American Mafia recruited and bribed several Boston College Eagles men's basketball players to ensure the team would not win by the required margin or win by the required margin, allowing gamblers in the know to place wagers against that team and win.
The CCNY point-shaving scandal of 1951 was a college basketball point-shaving gambling scandal that officially involved seven American colleges and universities in all, with four of these schools being in the New York metropolitan area, two of them occurring in the Midwest, and one of them being in the South. However, at least one other player from the Ivy League in New York would also be considered involved in the scandal retroactively. Furthermore, it was alleged that the reach of this scandal went as far as the West Coast of the United States out in California and Oregon through attempts to fix games out there. While the starting point wasn't from the CCNY nor did that college have the most implicated players involved from the event, the scandal became notable and infamous during that period of time due to the number of players in the scandal being players of the collegiate dual tournament champion 1949–50 CCNY Beavers men's basketball team. It was also seen as the biggest tipping point that threatened the integrity of college basketball's very existence at the time.
Irwin Dambrot was an American basketball player, best known for his college career at the City College of New York.
William Edwin Spivey was an American basketball player. A 7 ft 0 in (2.13 m) center, he played college basketball for the National Collegiate Athletic Association's (NCAA) Kentucky Wildcats from 1949 to 1951. After his high school career, Spivey was recruited by the University of Kentucky. During his time with the Wildcats, he led the team to the 1951 NCAA tournament championship. When a point shaving scandal was revealed that year, Spivey was accused of being involved, which he denied. He left the Wildcats in December 1951, and the university banned him from the squad in March 1952.
Sherman White was an American basketball player at Long Island University (LIU) who is best remembered for being indicted in a point shaving scandal that resulted in him being stripped of numerous honors and awards, having to serve an 8-month jail sentence, and being prohibited from ever playing in the National Basketball Association (NBA). As a college senior in 1950–51, White was the nation's leading scorer at 27.7 points per game and was only 77 total points shy of becoming the National Collegiate Athletic Association's (NCAA) all-time single season leading scorer when he was caught, thus forcing him to prematurely quit and never getting to finish his college basketball career.
William J. Walker Jr. was an American basketball player. He was a native of Queens, New York and played the guard position. Walker played collegiately for the Toledo Rockets from 1948 to 1951. He was known as an excellent dribbler and passer, and was the first officially recorded national season assists leader with his 7.24 per game average during the 1950–51 NCAA men's basketball season. However, Walker's collegiate accomplishments were overshadowed by his involvement in a point shaving scandal during his senior year.
During the 1960–61 NCAA University Division men's basketball season, a major gambling scandal involving a former NBA All-Star basketball player and many members of organized crime syndicates broke through which had ultimately been years in the making. The scandal involved 37 arrests of students from 22 different colleges, as well as at least nine players that received money from fixers or gamblers that were never convicted of crimes, eight go-betweens being prosecuted for their efforts in the scandal, and two players being shown to have received bribe offers without reporting them to proper authorities. Not only that, but close to fifty people who had associated ties with the scandal were reported to have been permanently banned from the NBA as well as a result of this case, including future Hall of Fame players Connie Hawkins and Roger Brown, thus making this case more infamous in terms of results and impact than the CCNY point-shaving scandal from a decade prior. However, it is slated that hundreds more players alongside 43 other college basketball games were controlled throughout the scandal by comparison.
Joseph N. Gagliano is an entrepreneur, former investment advisor, and author of the book No Grey Areas.
Jerry Lynn Graves was an American basketball player. He was banned from the National Basketball Association (NBA) for his involvement in the 1961 college basketball point shaving scandal during his senior season playing for the Mississippi State Bulldogs.
Dwayne Lamar Fontana is an American former basketball player. He played college basketball for Arizona State before going on to play professionally. In 2001, he was the leading scorer of the Icelandic Úrvalsdeild.
