by Tom Fowler
When they were about five paces away, I stopped. “Morning, guys,” I said. They offered no response. Up close, each possessed the height and girth of linemen on the football team. “I figured spring practice would consist of more than leisurely strolls.”
“We’ll definitely get some exercise,” the tallest one, a short-haired blond, said. The other two were about my height, maybe an inch taller, with dark hair—one sported a mullet—and full goatees. As someone who struggled to grow more than patchy facial hair, I felt a pang of envy.
“Let me guess,” I said. “Someone told you to discourage me from coming onto campus.” One of the dark-haired ones nodded. “You should have stood out by the road, then. I already drove on and parked my car.”
“Get back in it,” the blond one said, “and we won’t beat your ass.”
“You the only one who can talk? Maybe Tweedledee and Tweedledum here took a few too many shots to the head.”
“Fuck you,” the one on the left said. He started forward, but the fellow with the ‘eighties hair restrained him with a hand to the chest.
“My comment stands.”
“Last warning,” the fair-haired spokesman said.
“Guys, you should know something. I’ve been beating up football players since I was sixteen. I’m sure you’re all really good with the tackling dummy, but this isn’t going to end well for you. How about you turn around and walk away?”
“There are three of us,” Mullet said.
“I’m impressed. Maybe you go to math class after all.”
Mullet must have reached his breaking point because he charged. As I expected, he tried to wrap me up in a tackle. This probably worked very well for him on the football field. Today, however, I grabbed his right arm and flipped him onto his back. The grass cushioned his fall some, but his head still bounced off the ground. As he looked up at me with a dumbfounded expression he probably wore often, I kicked him hard in the face. The light went out.
I turned and looked at the other two. Blondie gaped while the other dark-haired idiot worked on his best menacing glower. The threat in it dissipated significantly before it spanned the fifteen feet between us. “Want to walk away now?” I asked them.
Dark Hair’s bull rush served as his response. I expected him to try and tackle me like his compatriot, so I readied myself to grab his arm and flip him. Instead, he drew his arms in, lowered his shoulder, and plowed straight into me. I tried to sidestep the hit when I realized what he had in mind, but the impact still drove me from my feet and sent me sprawling to the ground. He stalked toward me as Blondie advanced.
I let him grab my sweater and pull me to my feet, riding the momentum and kicking the blond one hard in the gut. While he doubled over, I blocked a punch from Dark Hair and elbowed him in the face. He rocked back a step. I gave him a hard shot in the gut, which drove him to one knee. Before I could follow up, though, someone grabbed me from behind. “Come on,” Blondie’s voice called out from my rear.
This guy already knocked me down once, and I didn’t care to let him try again by punching me. As the dark-locked one stood, I snapped my head back. I’m six-two and Blondie probably had four inches on me. The crown of my head probably took him in the nose. I felt his grip weaken. Dark Hair drew his fist back. His eyes brimmed with hatred.
I bashed my head into Blondie’s face again. A soft crack preceded his grunt. His grip slackened, and I ducked as fast as I could. The onrushing fist took him squarely in the jaw. The resultant crack was much louder this time. Blondie’s hands fell away completely as he collapsed to the grass. The other stared ahead with wide eyes.
Before he could recover, I punched him hard in the balls. He groaned and staggered back a couple steps. I regained my feet and snapped off a quick kick to my attacker’s midsection. He bent in half, and I drove a knee up into his face, snapping his head rearward and dropping him to the ground.
I looked around. We hadn’t drawn a crowd. This part of the campus didn’t see a lot of traffic, foot or otherwise. At some point, though, three large men lying on the grass would draw attention. I reversed course and headed back to my car before this happened.
I didn’t linger on campus after dealing with the three football players. Once word spread, the only people who would want to talk to me would be the campus police. Instead, I drove to my office. JHC’s first tournament game was tonight. I’d already scheduled a recording of it. To figure out if Calvin Murray and others actively engaged in point shaving, however, I needed game film. There was no way Coach Baker would provide it.
People like me always counted on other means of gathering information. I spent a few minutes researching JHC and their network, devising the best course of attack. After reviewing everything, I settled on good old phishing. There were many more advanced attacks to try, but all carried either a higher risk of detection or a lower chance of success. Phishing was a popular attack across the world for a reason.
It took a few minutes to craft the payload my message would carry. It was a PDF purporting to be a listing of restaurants in the tournament areas, complete with menus. In reality, it was a few pages of Towson-area sub shop menus, along with a rather insidious piece of malware. Most email programs now warned users not to open attachments from people they didn’t know. A lot of folks ignored this advice.
I boosted my odds of success with a spoofed email. It identified me as working for NCAA catering, which is not a thing but looks official enough to pass muster. I wrote a quick message saying I was emailing this information to all coaching staffs in the conference, sent it only to Coach Baker and his assistants, and waited.
With a game tonight, they were no doubt deep in preparation. By now, the players were likely reviewing film and prepping for a final run-through. I figured I would need to wait a few hours for someone to open the email and attachment.
Forty minutes later, I’d found a victim.
Assistant Coach Joe Coffey opened the PDF. I imagined him reading the email, grousing about the choices, and firing off an angry reply. The address I used would accept replies for the veneer of authenticity, but I wasn’t checking it. By now, the payload in the attachment would’ve installed a remote-access trojan onto Coffey’s computer. I checked with the command and control software, and it reported a live endpoint.
Now I needed to wait for Coach Coffey to leave his office for the game.
The Presidents tipped off at seven-thirty. I knew the coaches would be offline well before then, but I’ve also always thought patience was a great virtue for hackers to have. In the meantime, I’d gone home and ordered delivery for dinner while Gloria showered upstairs. She’d wanted to go out somewhere and seemed a little disappointed when I told her I’d planned a riveting evening of basketball.
About ten minutes before the opening whistle, I fired up my remote access trojan. Coach Coffey dutifully left his computer on. Most enterprises prefer this so they can update systems after working hours. The program began by harvesting his login credentials and passing them to the system. I was soon logged in under Coffey’s profile. The coach and his Rottweiler—who was the better-looking of the pair—stared back at me, the image serving as the desktop wallpaper.
Video files tend to be large. College basketball games consist of two twenty-minute halves. On TV, this can take well over two hours with halftime, and the final few minutes of a close contest can consume what feels like seventeen days. I’d never seen official game film, but I figured it would be the forty minutes of action plus some additional time spent focusing on timeouts. A forty-five minute high-definition video would eat up a lot of space. A season’s worth could take up a typical computer’s hard drive.
My hunch was JHC stored footage on network drives or in the cloud. The former would be easier for me. I was logged in as Coach Coffey, and today’s networks offered single sign-on to common resources. I poked around in Windows Explorer, eventually finding a video archive kept on the X: drive. A quick search showed games indexed by year.
I only cared about this year’s contests, so I went after those. Transferring files out of a network boundary is something systems log and administrators will eventually notice. Some networks even throw alerts about data exfiltration in real time. I perused the suite of security software and concluded JHC didn’t have this capability. I connected to an anonymized server I use for secure file transfer and moved the videos this way. Even over a fast connection, it would take a while.
Gloria came downstairs. Our food arrived a few minutes later. We enjoyed some excellent Chinese while watching the game and making sure my session as Coffey stayed alive. I tried to keep an eye out for anything suspicious on the court, but I really didn’t know what I was looking for. I enjoyed basketball enough but didn’t consider myself more than a casual fan. The Presidents moved the ball well, though they made a few bad passes and missed a handful of open shots. Maybe those were examples of players trying to keep the score close. A buzzer-beating three by Drexel just before halftime left Hanson up by only two.
During the second half, my file transfer finished. I used the remote access trojan to erase the system logs, then disconnected to watch the remainder of the game. Gloria occasionally asked questions about what transpired on the court. I was about fifty-fifty in being able to answer them. I knew lacrosse from playing it, and baseball and football from being a lifelong fan. Gloria understood tennis. By the end of tonight’s event, though, she knew what a pick-and-roll was. This counted as progress.
The final score was Hanson over Drexel 79-72. The Presidents, favored by nine and a half, won by seven. Anyone taking Drexel and the points would win the bet. I wondered how much money changed hands on this game and what quantity was handled by some random offshore casino. Maybe Margaret Madison turned a tidy profit on the night’s action.
After the final whistle, I was no closer to knowing if any points had been shaved than I was at tipoff. This needed to change.
Chapter 7
I was the proud owner of a few terabytes of JHC game film stored on an external hard drive. Overnight, I backed it up to cloud storage. In the morning, I came downstairs, made coffee, and looked at my list of questionable contests. I queued the first game of interest. It was a December tilt against Drexel. The Dragons went in as nine-point underdogs and only lost by three.
The game played much like last night’s playoff against the same opponent, only with a closer final margin. Hanson’s offense favored guards and motion, and they kept Drexel defenders off-balance much of the night. Bad passes led to turnovers, however, and the Dragons made the most of their opportunities. Calvin Murray, a good shooter, finished the night nine-for-twenty-four from the field.
This alone didn’t indicate much. Players could follow up a great game with a dud or vice versa. In my lacrosse days, there were times I felt every shot would go in and others where I couldn’t find the goal if someone held my hand and steered me to it. No one sniffed around our Loyola teams for goal shaving. Then again, maybe there wasn’t enough action on college lacrosse games to make such a thing a reality.
Before I could immerse myself in the second half, Gloria appeared in the doorway. She wore a long T-shirt as a nightgown and sipped coffee from a mug. “Right back at it?” she said.
I spent a moment regarding her legs before I answered. Gloria played tennis and practiced a lot, and the results showed in her tone. “I wanted to start early in case I need to go back to campus.”
“You’re so dedicated you forgot about breakfast.”
“Maybe I was hoping you’d cook.”
Gloria grinned at me. She knew I didn’t feel this way. I barely trusted her to make toast without summoning the fire department. Anything more complicated butted against her low level of kitchen competence. “Your homeowners insurance is current, right?”
“I think I can spare a few minutes to cook,” I said.
I whipped up a quick yogurt parfait and made a couple pieces of sourdough toast for Gloria. She ate in the kitchen while I took my bowl back down the hall. My basketball expertise remained low. Compared to Gloria in the kitchen, I was a hoops savant, but clearing this low bar didn’t help me on the case.
My hypothesis confirmed itself as I watched the next game. This time, Calvin enjoyed a pretty good night shooting, finishing ten-for-eighteen and contributing 26 points. Hanson didn’t cover the spread, however. I wondered about the subtleties of point shaving. Anyone looking into Calvin’s performance would see he made all five of his free throws, half of his six three-point attempts, and put up solid numbers overall. He even dished out nine assists against five turnovers. Did the lack of clangers mean he tried? Was someone else on the take? Was this game merely closer than expected, and no one enriched themselves too much on the result?
I needed someone who knew more than I did. A name floated into my mind, and I made a phone call to arrange a lunch appointment, and I knew from experience it would be an expensive one.
As usual, Joey Trovato already enjoyed an appetizer by the time I sat across from him. I was only a few minutes late. Joey always managed to be early for these lunches, and whatever he ordered before I arrived came out in record time. We occupied a booth at Della Notte in Little Italy, his favorite spot of late. “Just because you’re Italian doesn’t mean we need to eat here all the time,” I said.
Joey grinned. He was a black Sicilian of good humor and enormous appetite. “I like it here.”
There really weren’t any bad places to go in Little Italy. Sabatino’s was the most popular with tourists. I preferred Chiaparelli’s, though I doubted I would share my enthusiasm for it with Tony Rizzo. Apart from specials and a few health-conscious items, most of the restaurants served much of the same food, anyway.
Joey worked on a basket of fried calamari. Watching him dunk the squid in the marinara sauce reminded me I’d been watching too much basketball. I scanned the menu, and a pretty waitress appeared a moment later. She possessed a classic Italian complexion and dark hair. Her white button-down shirt strained to hold in her breasts, and I spied Joey eyeing her up as I ordered an iced tea and veal parmesan. Joey opted for mozzarella sticks and a seafood dish. As the waitress left, Joey watched her with interest. I didn’t blame him. The view was equally good from this side, too.
“Need an extra napkin for your drool?” I said.
“I’ll be all right.” He paused and smiled. “She’s beautiful.”
“Is she why you’ve been on a Della Notte kick?”
“It’s one of the best reasons to like a restaurant.” I rolled my eyes. “Hey, we can’t all talk to girls as easy as you.”
“Talking to people isn’t so simple,” I said. “It’s a matter of acknowledging the challenge and doing it anyway. If you think it’s easy and then you can’t do it, you only end up discouraging yourself.”
“Jesus,” Joey said. “If I knew you were gonna spout all this Tony Robbins shit, I woulda offered to buy lunch.”
“You can come to my seminar for five thousand dollars.”
He chuckled. “I’ll pass.” The waitress set down our drinks and Joey’s second appetizer. She smiled at him, which only seemed to encourage him.
“I asked you here for your professional opinion,” I said after waving a hand in front of Joey’s face to snap him back to the here and now.
“Who are you trying to find this time?” It was a reasonable question. Like me, Joey skirted the law in a business setup to help people. While I investigated crimes, he provided new identities for those who needed them. They’d stand up to scrutiny, and Joey was able to charge well for his services, which proved to be a mix of art and science. I’d seen him work before and came away impressed.
“No one yet. You still follow basketball?”
“It’s about the only sport I can stand to watch these days.” He frowned. “Why, what’s going on?”
“I need you to study some game film.”
“How the hell did you get game film?” I spread my hands and tried to look hu
rt. “Right. Never mind. Who’s the team?”
“John Hanson College.”
“Good squad,” Joey said. “They should win their conference tournament, which gets them a ticket to the dance. From there, it’s all about the matchups.”
“I’m not as concerned about their future as some of their previous games.” I glanced around. Della Notte drew a decent crowd for lunch. A couple of middle-aged guys in starched shirts and expensive suits sat at a table nearby. I lowered my voice and explained my concern. Joey didn’t say anything and provided no visible reaction. Our food arrived after I finished. When the server walked away, I said, “What do you think?”
“It’s possible,” Joey said. “Hasn’t been done in a while, so the kind of people likely to do it might think it’ll go unnoticed.” He was careful not to use the term “point shaving” in public. I appreciated it. “It might be retro enough to fly under the radar.”
“I think you’re the first person I’ve mentioned it to who really agrees with me . . . no, the second. The other one works in gambling.”
“We’re just a pair of visionaries,” Joey said, raising his soda glass.
“You think you can start watching the games?” I cut my veal as Joey stewed on his answer. The meat was tender enough to require almost no pressure from my knife.
“Sure.” Joey worked on a mozzarella stick while he talked. Other than chatting with food in his mouth, the man possessed good table manners. If he didn’t, my parents wouldn’t have invited him to so many dinners over the years. He was on his best behavior around them, of course. I got the raw version of Joey. “I’ll watch them. I know hoops better than you.”