The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz - PTFO - Moose, the Money and a Garbage-Time God: A PTFO Investigation

Episode Date: July 18, 2025

How did a seemingly random super-fan on NBA Twitter know about a federal gambling investigation... before the NBA did? And how does he connect to Carmelo Anthony, Nicolas Cage, Larsa Pippen, Jontay Porter, a legless woman, Malik Beasley, "Madea's Family Reunion," meme coins, and perhaps the greatest play in modern Knicks history? Correspondents Tom Haberstroh and Amin Elhassan join Pablo to run the numbers, grind the tape, and uncover a secret world of penthouse poker games and deleted accounts. • Subscribe to The Finder with Tom Haberstroh for more on this story http://tomthefinder.com/p/who-the-f-is-moose • Subscribe to Cinephobe with Amin Elhassan https://www.youtube.com/@CinephobePod • Subscribe to Basketball Illuminati https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLImO7ahoFX0g7GMLy5r7zGezv-0ixnDkU Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

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 gonna get another revelation based on how this morning and this past couple weeks

have gone, we're gonna 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. So thank you to Tom Havrish, Joe and Amin Elhassan for

reprising your roles as PTFL correspondents. It is great to have you here. It's great to be here. Okay. It is great to have you here. It's great to be here. 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 gonna 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. Because in April of 2024, as you might recall, an obscure Toronto Raptor named John T. 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 Awaday 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 Awaday is the guy in the top left in the red hoodie. But that was then. A couple weeks ago, on the eve of NBA free agency, the spotlight turned to someone new. This is 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. 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. 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. Oh, this is FBI?

This isn't local. This is FBI? Yeah, this is under federal possible. Oh, this is FBI? This isn't local, this is FBI? Yeah, this is under federal investigation. Oh, listen, brother, look, I know one thing, for certain two things for sure, if it's local police, you got a 50-50 chance against the government. 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 US sportsbook detected was, quote, According to ESPN, what one US 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. The sportsbook reported something very suspicious happened,ote, 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. 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. 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 Jontay 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 out 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 Steph Stefan Wardell Curry. 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 did 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. And Malik Beasley is pushing a shopping cart through a target in Detroit And he suddenly gets spotted by an employee at the store

Huh? I've been on the f***ing air bro. I appreciate it. Real s***. Thank you. Do you have a... I can't hear that. I can't hear that. Malik Beasley holding his hands up in the air and saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, fan

duel. I can't talk about that. That's right. 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. 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 Tipperals 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. Beasley's gonna get it off.

One last shot. How about Beasley's going to get it off. One last shot. How about Beasley? 21 points. And then does a two-handed dunk right before the buzzer. And what's interesting is that that cut the Clippers lead from 9 to 7. The spread on that game, guys, was 8 and a half. So, went from the Clippers covering to the Minnesota Timberwolves covering after that play.

The thing I'm fascinated by is the amount of people saying, there it is, proof. Oh, that's proof. You see how he looked over there on the bench and then he looked over 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 is 100% going to jail or yeah, he's done, he's finished. It's just wildly irresponsible. Here's the complexity though that Tom is alluding to. Malik Beasley has already been to jail.

Separate story. We're going gonna get there, I mean. We're gonna 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.

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. You might remember that on January 30th 2025 a few months ago

this news broke. 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, John T. Porter. 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 John T. Porter to be publicly identified as a part of this federal investigation into sports betting. And what I'm told is, contrary to Shams Charani'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 MBA, Tom, speaks to the federal investigation, which clearly is also still ongoing. Right, on that day, the same day that Terry Rozier news drops, this guy, Free Moose 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. This guy, Free Moose NBA, 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. And in this reporting, I determined this guy at the time of the tweet had something like 10,000 followers. And a lot of them were like, huh? Like, huh? Like what? One of them later that night in a tweet exchange with a Pistons fan, because Moolik 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. Moose says, quote, I can't yet. I'm sorry, but gotta protect myself. 15 views on that tweet. It's incredible. I mean, this time capsule, which is almost six months before the news breaks, right? On the eve of ReAgency, six f***ing 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 he's just throwing in 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. That betting slip is John T 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 violence that under investigation was

for the first time was January 26th yeah meaning whoever placed the slip had the in on the John T Porter action months before the investigation was announced. 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 Who the fuck is moose underscore NBA? How did a random Twitter user on NBA Twitter know about both? Jontay Porter and also Malik Beasley on the day that Terry Roger's name was included for the first time the second of the three guys Before any of this was breaking 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 FreeMoose underscore NBA. Until now. That was good. That was good, Papa. I just need people to know this is a story involves not just Riemu's MBA

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. The Garden is shaking right now. And none of you will ever look at that play the same way again.

Okay, so before we get back to the mystery of Free Moose underscore MBA, 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 Portal Call with the aforementioned Nicolas Cage.

When was the last time you saw her? I see her that morning. I go by in case she need anything but that morning she said she needs something from the grocery and she called there and had it delivered by a boy to her home. Help me please. Please help my finding killer for my family. Please sir help me. Help. It's not just Dina Beasley the mom it's also his father Michael Beasley. Not 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 Atlantic. And he and Denzel were together in The Great Debaters and Flight and Two Guns. Tell us about your trip. Lawyer. What's the big deal? Lawyer. You were down in Senora 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. 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 Some 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. My job is to he is the assistant coach that you might remember from Rudy 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 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 if you get him one-on-one that he was a bit of a child actor himself. Honestly if you want to see me in the background I'm an extra. Look in Medea's family reunion. What were you doing as an extra bro? I was an extra in Medea's family reunion. You used to be doing side missions bro. I was dancing with my mom. I don't think any show has ever investigated Medea's family reunion. If you wanna see me, I was dancing with my mom. I don't think any show has ever investigated Medea'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 found no evidence of it. We were fact checking every element of this story as you will see as much as we can. But something we did find instead is a quote that Malik's parents gave to an

outlet called noiseomaha dot 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. 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. Now, if you're looking for something to do this weekend, it 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 six today and tomorrow. 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. That you're allowed to be in. Your parade is not welcome here, is the implication.

Exactly. Move along 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 gonna 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 only are you sure that notebook is an awesome pabletorres house 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 Yell. Right? Just imagine $ 60 million dollars 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 guests 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. 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. It should come as no surprise to everyone that Malik's wife, Montana Yao, filed for divorce.

It should come as no surprise to everyone that Malik's wife Montana Yao filed for divorce. And so I just got to jump in here to point out that yes, all roads do lead to Larsa Pippen. Because of course they do. 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 eight million dollars 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 barber shop in Milwaukee, and not to be outdone, his dentist in Minnesota is also suing him, Dr. Hassan El-Shahabi. 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.

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 Medias 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. I talked to Mike Bowie for this story. Like, he is this analytics guru,

this mastermind behind this amazing indispensable site called unpredictable.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. Yes. 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?

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 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 the 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? Right. The key thing here is that the line was at two and a half rebounds. In that game, where all this unusual betting activities 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. You look at the film, he's busting his ass trying to get every rebound imaginable.

It looks like Charles Barkley out there. 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 Johnontay Porter, those cashed because he left the games early, right? And all the alleged co-conspirators were betting the unders and Jontay Porter was taking himself out of these games, effectively clinching

the unders and those bets were cashing. The opposite happened 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 hull 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 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 and the through line here when it comes to this part of the story Right is that is actually Tom really hard to find evidence in this category at least of really hard to find evidence in this category at least of malfeasance in Milwaukee. 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 the most important publicly accessible evidence available to us was not gonna to come from the bucks. It was going to have to come from a moose. Get to Toronto's main venues like Budweiser Stage and the new Rogers Stadium with Go Transit.

Thanks to Go Transit's special online e-ticket fairs, a $10 one-day weekend pass offers unlimited travel on any weekend day or holiday, anywhere along the Go network. And the weekday group passes offer the same weekday travel flexibility across the network, starting at $30 for two people and up to $60 for a group of five. Buy your online Go Pass ahead of the show at Gotransit.com slash tickets. 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, I would say, 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 underscore NBA, Tom. And the only way we could do that is to go on a moose hunt. Going on a moose hunt. Not a silly moose hunt. Every parent knows. I don't know that song.

But speaking of stuff that gets stuck in your head. As we had established, Free Moose underscore NBA deleted his Twitter account and disappeared entirely. Which is a problem here. But here's the thing. The tweets that tagged FreeMoose underscore 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 underscore NBA used to go by another handle. At Moose underscore NBA. But at Moose underscore 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 for freedom. And then deep inside a haystack of hundreds upon hundreds of truly useless tweets that tagged Moose underscore 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 underscore NBA, but it also tagged a second account. Underscore Mustafa underscore Omar. So he says, yo, underscore Mustafa underscore Omar, your shit got suspended.

WTF? Question mark, question mark. No! And then he tags, at moose underscore NBA, heartbreak emoji. Which I think takes us to what moose might actually be referring to as a mean, as 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. Yes. 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? Where it's 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 node on the Knicks' social graph on Twitter, because Rob was running a promo where the prize was

a signed Jalen Brunson jersey and when at 123 747 4849 lowercase 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 underscore 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. 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 young man, trimmed beard, blue top that happens to be a Carmelo Anthony Nicks 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 underscore NBA himself, which showed the same exact young man with a trim beard posting a selfie video while trying on a Nick's 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? Because a lot of people do not like MooseNBA because of what happened next. This brings us back to the original bio of MooseNBA meme coin expert. But there is this other thing we found. Another Twitter account which tagged Moose underscore NBA in the bio. And this account is just the piles of cash.

Piles and piles. A cartoonish amount of cash. Just as the banner photo. So this account is called moose and boulders pics. And this account sells, you guessed it, sports betting picks. Which takes us to a tweet, again, dated Thanksgiving-ish 2024. When this account posted, quote,

join the Discord and forever be esh 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. So you're saying they didn't make a huge pile of money like the banner would have indicated? 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 NCA 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.'" End quote.

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 John T 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 123-747-484849A 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, don't forget about this thing. This is insane It's like, he like, like, 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 gonna 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. 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 what's going on not too much for a man how we doing on this fine Tuesday I'm not too bad. I'm busy at work. I'm not too bad. I took a little time off. Oh yeah? What's work for you? I am a manager at an auto collision shop. Okay. Very cool. And where's that at? In New York somewhere? 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 for picking up. I love Tom's just like, what level of bro am I doing here with crypto gambler? You can hear like my throat is getting dry. Like I can't believe this guy is talking.

It's incredible. I mean, it's just the mean. What are you doing on this fine Tuesday? Like what are you talking about? The most journalistic tried and true method of knocking on the front door. 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. Yeah, a bunch of times. Who would you say is your favorite Knicks player of all time?

Gotta be Mello. Carmelo Anthony? Yeah, gotta be Mello.elo Anthony yes gotta be mellow 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 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 just good research, is all. 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 NBAPR 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 NBAPR 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. Did he ever find out why he was getting suspended? Well he says he doesn't know. I wasn't like the most

family-friendly account either. I'm sure something was that people are gonna take to liking sometimes. I'm sure that's possible. 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 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. 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 cryptic from when it did come out. People could look back at it the way that they did when the news that came out. But how did you come across the Malik Beasley info? Yeah, I mean, I know a lot of people in the basketball and the gambling space. So, you know, work does get around. Eventually, it gets to me from people that I know. Obviously, people I'm not going to like say their name, but I do have people that do know. Obviously people I'm not going to say their name but I do have people that 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. And just to be clear here that's Moose talking, right? He's saying Malik Beasley did it. That's not us saying that. 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. Damn. Yo, this is one of my favorite things whenever we're doing content, Pablo. In my mind, Duncan Robinson's sitting back, like, huh, a new episode of Pablo Torre finds out, let me watch. And he hears that, like, what the f*** do I do? Why I get s*** on? 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. 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. Again, of course, we, Medea's family, reunion this. We 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. 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. 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? Yeah, it's a fair point. Fair one percent, seeded out to put into this. So then I started asking Mustafa Omar, Moose, about the Jontay Porter fan dual betting slip that he posted, which again was placed on January 22nd, 2024, months before the Jontay Porter investigation was ever public.

Now when I asked him about this, he became casier than he'd been at any point in our conversation. I said, I don't know much about the slip. Like I said, it was just sent to me from someone, but... 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. 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, end quote. 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. So hold on. At this point in time, November 2024, the only gambling incident known, confirmed in the

NBA is John Tay Porter. Yes. In the John Tay Porter story, the feds found this deeply sloppy private telegram chat and the most memorable character in John Tay 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 John T 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 four million dollars. The person that she trusted to cash one of her final settlement checks for around eight hundred thousand dollars, according to these legal documents, happens to be be this same deli owner. What the f**k f**k f**k f**k. By the name of Ammar Awaday. And Ammar 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. This is as dark as it gets, this story.

I missed 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. Let me guess. Ammar Awaday. F***ing nailing this pronunciation. God damn it. That was good. So he's not lying when he says, I'm connected with a guy who's involved in the NBA's gambling

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

and 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 a sort of game where the minimum buy-in is $2,500, AKA 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 Jontay 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. Anyhow when I showed my source to again fact-check this profile, this Facebook profile of Omar Awaday, 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 John Tate Porter investigation, remember John Tate Porter was banned for life from the NBA as of April 2024, Amar was still texting people trying to set up poker games. From my source, I do remember thinking, is he so arrogant that he thinks he's above this? 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 John Tate Porter betting slip screenshot that he tweeted out back in January of 2024. I said, I don't know much about the slip. Like I said, it was just sent to me from someone, but... So here I had to do the most important thing in this conversation. I had to ask Moose about his connection to Ammar directly. Are you friends with or do you know Ammar Awade? No.

No? No. No? No. 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. No. That's it. Just no. Like, this guy's been super chatty this whole time,

and when I bring up Amar Awaday, just one word, no. 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 like 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. Hartenstein gets it out to Ananobe. DiVincenzo at three. Bang! Bang! Knicks take a one-point lead with 13 seconds remaining! So I just gotta jump in here to point out that this game at Madison Square Garden happened five days after Jontay Porter got banned for life from the NBA. Which means that it also happened while the Feds were actively investigating Ammar 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, and his name when Amar Awade is dapping up in his Facebook banner photo after arguably the greatest play in modern NICS history. Because, of course... It's Moose's Goat, Carmelo Anthony! Amazing! He looks jubilant! He couldn't, it looks like the happiest day of his...

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 looking great. All of which reminded us of something. Something we had found pretty early on in our search for any tweet that had tagged moose underscore 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 underscore nba. Get the f*** out of here. 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? And after countless more hours of Twitter and Facebook searching, we realized something. The guy sitting next to Ammar Awade, who's pictured holding his 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 underscore 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 Omar's brother, Omar Awadeh. Even though Moose denied even knowing Omar 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 Spreewell 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. At which point, it became clear that Moose Underscore NBA, Twitter's Malik Beasley Prophet, was more than just Facebook friends with alleged Jante Porter co-conspirator Ammar Awade. Moose was his relative. His cousin. Meaning we had literally gone from Medea's family reunion to Mustafa's. 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 John Tate Porter legal documents, quote, a relative of the defendant, Ammar Awaday, whose identity is known to me, placed a $10,000 parlay bet through betting company one on the under for player one's three pointers, assists, and steals. It goes on to talk about how the relative won $85,000, netting a profit of $75,000.

how the relative won $85,000, netting a profit of $75,000. And so just saying that Ammar 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. I had to follow up with Mustafa to make sure he had his story straight on this. So I asked him again. You did not get information on Malik Beasley from Ammar Awaddeh, who is part of the Porter

case? No. Like I said, I got it off of Reddit. Do you have that Reddit forum that you got it from that you could show me? I could probably find that. Yeah. Would you be fine with me searching it and then getting into it on Twitter? Yeah.

Yeah, that'd be great. All right. Let's do that then. 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 Reddit? 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. Net 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 123-747-4849, 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. was taken down seconds after we got off that phone. All of it, gone. Unfortunately for Moose, we also love screenshots. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. 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 John T. Porter bedding slip, right? This is now what Moose had posted. That was dated what, Tom?

The bedding slip, if you look at it closely, it says January 22nd, 2024, okay? The game one in the John Tay Porter case came four days later, January 26. So that's important here because this actually predates that game one, which is to say, I mean, that 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 was 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 sports book that flagged this to ESPN. So we have within less than 10 days the betting slip, the first John T. Porter game, and the Malik Beasley game. We have to note the timeline here that this January 31st game is, it's 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. And by the way, we've also been making calls about Malik Beasley. Malik Beasley's attorney attorney Steve Haney, Tom, he didn't send us a statement, right? 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. 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 and 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 in 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 Ammar 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 John T 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-timed 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 middle arc 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-ined 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 3. Every time I think about it, they pull me back in. The rule of the Godfather 3. Every time I think about it, they pull me back in. The rule of the Godfather 3. This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production, and I'll talk to you next time.