Ex-Miami Heat Guard Terry Rozier Hit With Federal Bribery Charges Over Alleged $100K Kickback

Bribery Charges Add to Existing Wire Fraud Case

Federal prosecutors filed the new bribery charges against Rozier on Thursday in a superseding indictment returned by a federal grand jury in Brooklyn. The new counts (sports bribery and honest services wire fraud conspiracy) add to existing wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy charges from the original indictment. Co-defendants Laster and Shane Hennen were also charged with the bribery-related counts.

According to the indictment, Rozier devised a “predetermined bribe arrangement” with co-conspirators to exit a Charlotte Hornets game against the New Orleans Pelicans on March 23, 2023, allowing bettors holding “under” prop bets on his stat line to win. Rozier played just nine minutes and 34 seconds in the game and missed the Hornets’ next eight contests. Some sportsbooks stopped taking prop bets on Rozier that night because of the volume of wagers.

The indictment was filed within hours of a guilty plea by co-conspirator Marves Fairley, who admitted he made the payment to an NBA player as part of the scheme and also admitted to using insider information on NBA, NCAA, and Chinese Professional Basketball League games. Per the superseding indictment, Rozier and his co-conspirators later negotiated the original $100,000 bribe down to roughly $70,000 because the bettors’ winnings were lower than expected.

Rozier was initially arrested last October in a sweeping FBI crackdown that snared 34 defendants across two federal indictments tied to illegal sports betting and rigged poker games. He was released on a $3 million bond secured by his Florida home. Former NBA player Damon Jones, who was arrested in the same sweep, pleaded guilty last month to feeding inside information to bettors and serving as a “face card” to attract high-end gamblers at rigged poker games. The NBA placed Rozier on indefinite leave after his arrest, and the Miami Heat waived him last month.

Rozier has denied participating in the scheme. His attorney, Jim Trusty of Ifrah Law, filed a motion to dismiss the case in December, arguing the government’s theory that Rozier prevented sportsbooks from making informed decisions about accepting certain bets runs afoul of a recent Supreme Court ruling that narrowed the federal wire fraud statute. Trusty wrote in an email to The Associated Press that the new indictment was “just an effort to make something stick.”

The story is coming just a few weeks after U.S. Army Master Sergeant Gannon Ken Van Dyke pleaded not guilty to five federal charges over a series of Polymarket bets in relation to the Maduro raid, and as a Panama player publicly accused his own teammate of match-fixing, triggering a formal league investigation five weeks before Panama plays in the FIFA World Cup.

The case has fueled growing scrutiny of sports betting integrity systems. Recently, player unions for the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, and MLS jointly asked the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to ban “negative outcome” and “mention” event contracts on platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi – a category that includes the under-prop bets at the heart of Rozier’s case. The unions argue that contracts that can pay out when a player underperforms create direct incentives for the kind of manipulation alleged in the indictment.