Pro Basketball Hall of Famer Chauncey Billups, former NBA guard and Cleveland Cavaliers assistant Damon Jones and 29 co-defendants who are charged with taking part in mafia-rigged poker games are scheduled to go to trial Nov. 2.

A federal judge set the date after all 31 people charged by prosecutors appeared for a status hearing at a courthouse in Brooklyn on Tuesday. Billups and Jones are being accused of being the honey to lure unsuspecting players to high-stakes poker games at an apartment in Manhattan.

But what the players didn’t know was that the game was compromised in ways that would make Inspector Gadget blush. The Feds say members of the Bonanno, Gambino and Genovese crime families worked together in the scheme that ran at least since 2021, stealing about $7 million from unsuspecting players.

“As alleged, members and associates of organized crime families fixed illegal poker games as part of a highly sophisticated and lucrative fraud scheme to cheat victims out of millions of dollars and conspired with others to perpetrate their frauds,” stated United States Attorney Nocella.  “Well-known former NBA players and former professional athletes, acted as ‘Face Cards’ to lure unsuspecting victims to high-stakes poker games, where they were then at the mercy of concealed technology, including rigged shuffling machines and specially designed contacts lenses and sunglasses to read the backs of playing cards, which ensured that the victims would lose big.  Today’s indictment and arrests sounds the final buzzer for these cheaters.”

Prosecutors say game organizers used high-tech tools to fleece the players, including a poker table with a built-in x-ray machine that could read the cards face-down on the table, chip trays with cameras, old fashioned signaling between confederates, marked cards that could be read using special contact lenses, and rigged shuffle machines that were hacked to set the deck in any order.

Doug Polk, one of the owners of The Lodge Card Club in Texas and popular content creator, spoke to Wired about being aware of how shuffle machines can be hacked.

“If there’s a camera that knows the cards, there is always some kind of underlying threat,” Polk said. “Customers are gonna be essentially at the mercy of the person setting up the machine. If you’re showing up in a private game and there’s a shuffler, I would say you should run for the hills.”

Billups faces charges of money laundering conspiracy and wire fraud conspiracy for his alleged role. Since his arrest, Billups has been put on administration leave as head coach of the Portland Trailblazers.

Prosecutors told the judge on Tuesday that they are in talks with a dozen of the defendants for plea offers, and at least nine other defendants are talking about pleading guilty, according to ESPN. It’s not know if Billups is among those people.

During the hearings, prosecutors say they have more than 100,000 pages of financial records and telephone records and over 800 pages of surveillance photographs to support their case.