A crazy story ran in the NY Daily News this weekend that asked if the 1982 Knicks were really the New York Fix.
It was based on a new book that alleges members of the 1981-82 Knicks were a gang of coke-sniffing ballers, shaving points for a major East Coast drug hustler.
Brian Touhy, author of “Larceny Games: Sports Gambling, Game Fixing and the FBI," says he has over 400 FBI documents detailing rampant game-fixing in the NBA, NFL and MLB.
Touhy said, “The FBI had info that two to three members of his Knicks were shaving for a coke dealer and that informants think the players were unfathomably betting on themselves to lose.
The investigation stemmed from a local drug dealer who had recently started betting major chips on the Knicks and cashing out lovely. According to philly.com, the dealer was a degenerate gambler who usually bet $300 a game, informants told investigators, but in January 1982 he began laying $10,000 wagers on Knicks’ opponents — and winning them.
Unfortunately the files and names are severely obscured and illegible, so it will never be proven. I guess the FBI had bigger fish to fry, like catching Pete Rose. Even if this is more than a conspiracy theory, obviously the NBA and government wanted no parts of it. In today’s sports climate a story such as this would be pretty unbelievable, but in the '80s when coke use was rampant in the NBA and salaries hadn’t ballooned to its current levels, there were cats whose excessive lifestyles devoured their paychecks.
Half of the league was blowing cheddar on liquor, drugs and fast women and falling victim to the social repercussions of the cocaine and crack explosion of the '80s. One of the NBA's most talented junkies, floor general Michael Ray Richardson, who was suspended by Commissioner David Stern indefinitely in 1986 for repeat cocaine abuse, was supposedly the point guard of this embarrassing situation as well. Touhy says Richardson was dumping games as a “favor” to his drug dealing homie. This is just further proof of the commonly expressed revelation that NBA life in the '80s was truly the Wild Wild West.