The Colombo Mob Family Allegedly Tried To Bribe A College Hoops Team To Throw A Game Recently... WHAT?!?

[Source] - The court-authorized wiretaps also captured the defendants’ scheme to fix an NCAA college basketball game.  To further the scheme, defendant Benjamin Bifalco offered members of a college basketball team thousands of dollars to intentionally lose the game.   

Now this obviously isn’t the first time that we’ve heard of the mob trying to organize a thrown college hoops game, but it’s still always a crazy story to me when it comes to light. Obviously we all remember the Boston College team that threw games:

Now what I need to know is what team was offered to throw a game. Obviously not one that’s a big Barstool place since we didn’t get a hot tip. Feel a little disgusted that there was no hot tip discussed honestly. I would have 100% thrown this into a blog or something, but I digress.

The funny or ironic thing about this all is how little they were going to pay for this game to be thrown. A few thousand bucks? Brian Bowen was getting over a hundred thousand just to go play for Louisville. Talk about not knowing the market. Of course a team isn’t going to throw it for ‘thousands of dollars.’

Here’s the other thing. I need to know how many points the spread was. Are we talking something like losing by 10 instead of 6? That’s not impossible. Or are we going bigger numbers here? Also, how dumb do you have to be to talk about this on the phone? 

Bifalco first asked Amato Jr. if it was okay for him to “talk about this on the phone,” court papers say.

“I mean, why not?” Amato Jr. answered. “You talk about everything else on the f—— phone, and you’re an idiot.”

In a series of phone calls over the next several days, Bifalco laid out his plan to fix the game by “offering to pay thousands of dollars to multiple members of a basketball team so that they would intentionally lose by a lot,” allowing the favored team to cover the point spread, the court papers say.

Bifalco tried to persuade Amato Jr. to place thousands of dollars on the game, according to federal prosecutors.

I can’t imagine how terrifying the situation has to be for the college team here. You get presented this scheme from a crime family and you now have to tell them no? No thank you. I also can’t imagine going into a locker room and trying to address the team on how to throw a game.

If I had to guess though with absolutely no information – St. John’s. They just feel like they’d throw a game. Plus, Artest has said before he was approached about throwing games when he was there. Again, just a 100% guess.