Tim Donaghy

The arraignment for two high school friends of disgraced NBA referee Tim Donaghy is scheduled for this morning in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn. Thomas Martino and James Battista, who were indicted by a federal grand jury earlier this month, will appear before Judge Carol Amon. Donaghy, a Drexel Hill native, pleaded guilty before Amon in August to charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and transmitting betting information. He is to be sentenced April 18. Martino, 42, of Marcus Hook, is charged with lying to the grand jury in 2007.

NBA players association executive director Billy Hunter: "Clearly it feeds to that whole psyche, folks believe that there's a series of conspiracies and the outcome is dictated and that it's almost a show. The last thing you want to do is to take on the aura of World Wide Wrestling. I think people want to believe that the winner is based on merit and the best team wins in a given circumstance and that there are no prerequisites. It's not being staged. So what it does is it impacts the integrity of the game.

Disgraced NBA referee Tim Donaghy, having admitted yesterday to depression, a gambling addiction, betting on games he officiated, and providing bookmakers with inside information, will get at least one more opportunity to embarrass the league that employed him for 13 years. The Havertown native, who pleaded guilty in U.S District Court in Brooklyn to charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and transmitting betting information, will be sentenced Nov. 9, one week into an NBA season that already will be tarnished by a scandal that commissioner David Stern has characterized as the league's worst ever.

Federal agents investigating NBA referee Tim Donaghy for alleged gambling activities have focused in part on his ties to sports bookmakers in the Philadelphia region, people close to the investigation said yesterday. Several people from Delaware County who know either Donaghy or reputed Phoenixville bookmaker James "Baa Baa" Battista were recently subpoenaed in the case and traveled to New York to testify before a federal grand jury, a source said. Battista, 42, attended Cardinal O'Hara High School with Donaghy in the mid-1980s.

A former NBA official is under investigation in connection with his role in allegedly shaving points in league games he officiated in the last few years, according to two league sources. Tim Donaghy, 40, who grew up in the Philadelphia area, is being investigated by officials in the FBI's New York office to determine whether he made officiating calls that affected the final scores and betting lines of games the last two seasons to ease gambling debts. A number believed to be Donaghy's home phone in Bradenton, Fla., went unanswered yesterday afternoon.

The estranged wife of former NBA referee Tim Donaghy said yesterday that her husband was being "treated unfairly" by Florida authorities who arrested him Tuesday for a possible parole violation. Kimberly Donaghy, who has not yet been granted the divorce she filed for in 2007, reiterated what the ex-referee's lawyer had said about the incident that landed Donaghy back in jail in Tampa, Fla. "Tim had permission to be with a physical therapist for his knee injury," she said in an e-mail to The Inquirer.

Two Philadelphia-area men implicated in an NBA betting scheme with disgraced referee Tim Donaghy pleaded not guilty yesterday, while the lawyer for one continued to hint that Donaghy might not be the only NBA official involved. "I'm just not sure if the concept of 'rogue referee' is appropriate," said Jack McMahon, the Philadelphia attorney representing James "Baba" Battista. "It seems odd that he [Donaghy] also was betting on games that he didn't referee. That sounds to me like it ought to be a red flag.

There's no place Tim Donaghy's troubles are felt more intensely than Drexel Hill, the Delaware County community whose basketball heritage is as thick as the walls of the sturdy Tudors and stone Colonials lining its shady streets. Donaghy, the disgraced referee who is scheduled to be sentenced in New York on July 14, almost a year after admitting he bet on NBA games he officiated, grew up there. And it was Drexel Hill's peculiarly powerful devotion to the game in the 1960s and early 1970s that drew him to basketball.

Four NBA referees ran a clinic at Don Guanella School in Springfield yesterday. Mike Callahan, Joe Crawford, Tim Donaghy and Mark Wunderlich, all of Delaware County, conducted drills, contests and a question-and-answer session with the developmentally disabled students.

TIM Donaghy has a gambling problem? He's a victim now? Oh please!! How tired is the "Boo-Hoo, I'm a Victim" excuse? I guess when you have nothing else to offer, an uncreative attorney like John Lauro can't come up with a fancy dance for you. Betting on a game about which you possess privileged information or in whose outcome you have influence is no gamble. It's a crime of greed and opportunity. Tim Donaghy "expresses a great deal of remorse and concern about the pain that he's caused his family, his friends and his co-workers.

Tim Donaghy, you may have heard, used his position as an NBA referee to make some money, but that landed him in prison on federal gambling charges. So he tried to earn some legitimate cash, using his notoriety to market his tell-all book, "Personal Foul: A First-Person Account of the Scandal that Rocked the NBA. " Now that plan appears to have backfired, too. Donaghy is alleging in court documents that his ex-publisher used him to pay off debt or line her own pockets - and he's got her brother backing him up. Donaghy, 43, filed a lawsuit this week in a Pinellas County, Fla., court, charging that VTi-Media chief executive Shawna Vercher had misappropriated $300,000 in book revenue, leaving him without his cut of the profits to pay restitution for his crimes and support his family.

AS HIS LIFE has spiraled out of control, Tim Donaghy has fiercely held on to one precious piece of dignity. He has repeatedly insisted he never made any calls that would have influenced the result of an NBA game or impacted whether he won or lost a bet on any game he officiated. That is also the one thing that kept his father, Gerry, a now retired college official, from being even angrier at what his son did. Sean Griffin, an associate professor in criminal justice at Penn State Abington and a former Philadelphia police officer, is less than sure Tim Donaghy has been telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Tim Donaghy has become the latest public figure to write a book before reading one. The difference is that most of those other "authors" had ghost writers. Donaghy said he had help from no one - except his mother. In his new book, Personal Foul: A First-Person Account of the Scandal that Rocked the NBA, the disgraced NBA referee writes that because he was never a very good student, he was proud of himself for graduating from Villanova. "Not bad," he wrote, "for someone who had never read a book.

Tim Donaghy still has the black BMW he bought when there was so much cash he had to hide some in a bedroom safe. But the disgraced NBA referee hasn't been able to hang onto much else. His wife, his $250,000-a-year dream job, his self-respect, the "ecstasy" he got from gambling, are all gone now. So is the cherished photo that used to hang in his parents' Havertown den - the one that pictured the father-son referees standing proudly side-by-side. His father removed it when the son's name turned up in too many sordid headlines.

Tim Donaghy may have thrown away his 13-year career for less than half a year's salary by gambling on NBA games he officiated. But once that ball was in the air, the top-tier referee and the pathological gambler almost became two separate persons, he says. And they didn't help each other out. At least, not after tipoff. In his first public statements since he was sentenced last year to 15 months in prison on gambling and wire-fraud charges, Donaghy insisted that he never used his position to increase his chances of winning a bet. "I tried to put it out of my mind," he told Bob Simon in a "60 Minutes" interview that aired last night.

Merry Christmas, David Stern! Crooked ex-referee Tim Donaghy, fresh out of jail, has arranged for the publication of his tell-all book just in time for the holidays. The perfect stocking stuffer for the NBA commissioner who has everything. "Personal Foul: A First-Person Account of the Scandal That Rocked the NBA" will be available in bookstores nationwide by Christmas. It will be prereleased Friday to select outlets. Donaghy, the Villanova grad who recently completed a federal prison sentence for gambling on basketball games through two Philadelphia-area associates, will discuss his memoir on "60 Minutes" in an interview with Bob Simon tentatively scheduled to air Sunday.

The finest information Jimmy Battista received in his years as a full-time professional gambler, he says now, came from former NBA referee Tim Donaghy. "I called him the King - Elvis," Battista told HBO Real Sports in an interview aired last night. "Nobody picked winners like he did. Nobody. " Battista, who attended Cardinal O'Hara High in Delaware County with Donaghy, served 15 months in prison after pleading guilty to conspiring to make illegal bets after going into business with Donaghy.

The money man behind the Tim Donaghy betting scandal had a cute nickname for the disgraced former NBA referee. "I called him the king. Elvis," Jimmy Battista told HBO's Bryant Gumbel in a segment on the network's "Real Sports" program that aired last night. "Because nobody picked winners like he did. Nobody. " The relationship between Battista and Donaghy goes back to the 1980s when they attended Cardinal O'Hara. Earlier this decade, Battista, a professional gambler who also has had problems with drug addiction, befriended Donaghy when he learned the referee had a gambling problem.

Former NBA referee Tim Donaghy was released yesterday from a Florida prison, having completed a 15-month jail term for wire-fraud and gambling charges, minus about 2 months for good behavior. Now the hard part begins, as the 42-year-old ex-con seeks to rebuild his life, find a new job and begin paying restitution to the NBA for calling in betting tips to two Philadelphia-area gambling buddies while he was working as a referee. "He's out, and now he's going to have to make some decisions on how he's going to live his life," Donaghy's attorney, John Lauro, said yesterday after his client was released from the Hernando County Jail in Brooksville.

Tim Donaghy's tumultuous journey through the federal prison system, which he says included a beatdown from an inmate who claimed to have New York mob connections, finally is coming to an end. The Havertown-bred former NBA referee is scheduled to be released tomorrow from the Hernando County (Fla.) Jail, where he's finishing a 13-month prison term for his part in a gambling scandal that triggered an avalanche of negative publicity for the league. Donaghy, 42, pleaded guilty in 2007 to federal wire-fraud and gambling charges.