A reputed mobster arrested Thursday in the NBA's explosive gambling scandal pleaded guilty last week to unrelated charges that he violently tried to take over the Big Apple's trash business.
Alleged Gambino capo Joseph Lanni, aka “Mommino,” was charged Thursday with participating in a multimillion-dollar rigged poker game ring run by mobsters who enlisted NBA notables — Portland Trail Blazers coach and former player Chancey Billups and ex-Cavalier Damon Jones — to lure victims into gambling.
The arrest came less than a week after he pleaded guilty Oct. 17 alongside six other reputed miscreants to running a sprawling racket that used extortion, witness retaliation and other crimes to try to bring the city's trash and demolition industry under its control, prosecutors said at the time.
Lanni, 54, was hit with a new, unrelated indictment Thursday, charging him with one count of operating an illegal gaming business for allegedly collecting proceeds from ill-gotten winnings taken from victims of poker games.
The new case, which charges a total of 31 people, including the two NBA greats, accuses Lanni and two other alleged members of the Gambino family of collecting payments from a group of people who hosted underground poker games at 80 Washington Place in Greenwich Village.
The mobsters allegedly arranged payments to Billups and Jones to act as “face cards” to lure victims who wanted the opportunity to play against a former professional athlete. Victims are believed to have lost millions of dollars in the scam, prosecutors said.
Federal authorities requested that Lanni be held without bail while awaiting trial in his new case, on the grounds that he has a history of criminal convictions and violence.
They noted that he also allegedly maintained contact with other artificial men while he was on release from the city's waste trading project, violating the conditions of his release.
Lanni – who lives on Staten Island and is also known as “Joe Brooklyn” – was first convicted in 1999 of securities fraud and sentenced to 2.5 years in prison. He was convicted again in 2014 for promoting gambling and was sentenced to a year in prison, prosecutors said in court documents.
The alleged gangster was also allegedly involved in intimidating a witness in 2021 who he and two other gangsters said had ratted them out, prosecutors claimed.
Additionally, Lanni and alleged goon Vincent “Vinny Slick” Minsquero got into a wild confrontation with the married owners of a restaurant in Toms River, New Jersey in September 2023 after the couple asked them to leave for arguing with customers.
Things came to a head when Lanni and her boyfriend threatened to burn down the establishment “with you in it” and allegedly beat the couple later that night, according to court documents.
To carry out their threat, the two men went so far as to buy a tank of gasoline at a station located opposite the restaurant. But they later returned the container, authorities said. They have not been charged for this incident.
Lanni faces up to five years in prison if convicted of the new charge in the rigged gambling case. He has yet to be sentenced on a guilty plea to racketeering conspiracy, for which he could receive a sentence of 6.5 to 8 years, a judge in the case said last week.
The rigged poker games took place starting in 2019 in Miami, Las Vegas, the Hamptons and two locations in Manhattan, including the Washington Place townhouse where Kylie Jenner and Travis Scott lived in 2021 when the influencer was pregnant with their second child, authorities said.
The famous couple was not mentioned in the indictment and there was no indication they knew what was happening.
Four of the five New York families of La Cosa Nostra were involved in the rigged poker games: the Gambinos, Genoveses, Luccheses and Bonannos, according to prosecutors.
Meanwhile, another indictment, also unsealed Thursday, accused Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier, aka “Scary Terry,” and former Cleveland Cavaliers player Jones of distributing inside information about teams and players for betting on games.
Although Billups was not charged in the second case, he is considered “co-conspirator 8” in his court documents, which allege he informed bettors that the Blazers were going to forfeit their March 24, 2023 game against the Chicago Bulls — a trick that netted players big winnings, according to court documents.
Billups and Rozier have been placed on leave from their teams, according to the NBA, which said it is cooperating with the federal government.
“We take these allegations with the utmost seriousness and the integrity of our game remains our top priority,” the NBA said in a statement Thursday.
Lanni's lawyers in the racketeering case did not immediately respond to a Post request for comment Friday morning. It is not immediately clear who is representing him in this new case.
No one opened the door to Lanni's house during a Post visit there Friday, and no one picked up the phone when the Post called the numbers listed for him.
https://nypost.com/2025/10/24/sports/reputed-nba-mobster-joseph-lanni-pleaded-guilty-last-week-in-separate-case/
