How a 'betfluencer' from Washington, Pa., wound up at the center of an NBA gambling scandal

PHILADELPHIA — On the green felt of a Bellagio baccarat table, Shane “Sugar” Hennen flaunted $3,125 in winnings from a Pittsburgh Pirates game in June 2014.

It was a drop in the bucket for Las Vegas moneylines. But on Instagram, Hennen called it “#2dayswork.”

He was burnishing his brand as a high-stakes gambler, documenting his exploits under the handle bestthateverdidit. Within a decade he would place bets 100 times larger than that on a Saturday night in Philadelphia.

“Chances make champions ����,” Hennen posted in March 2023, showing off a successful $300,000 wager made at Rivers Casino in Fishtown.

But Hennen’s hot streak came crashing down this year with his arrest and indictment in two alleged bet-fixing scandals — part of a series of investigations that ensnared a Temple University basketball player, Toronto Raptors forward Jontay Porter, Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups and Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier.

Hennen’s arrest in January in connection with an illegal betting scheme involving Porter was a prelude to what prosecutors now say is a much larger scheme. The 40-year-old gambler was charged again last week with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering, part of a sprawling federal indictment that netted 34 people in 11 states. Hennen is accused of placing fraudulent prop bets on four NBA games between 2023 and 2024, which prosecutors said he did using a whisper network of nonpublic intel about players.

In one instance, prosecutors claim Hennen learned that Rozier, then on the Charlotte Hornets, would fake an injury and exit a game early in March 2023. Hennen personally wagered $61,000 and conspired with others — including a still-unnamed relative from Pennsylvania — to bet an additional $200,000 on Rozier’s underperformance, according to the complaint. Hennen then allegedly divvied up the proceeds with other gamblers in Philadelphia, who later brought winnings to Rozier’s home in North Carolina.

In a related case unsealed last week, federal authorities also accused Hennen of providing rigged card-shuffling machines and other technology used to fix mob-affiliated poker games in New York City.

Messages left at phone numbers associated with Hennen were not returned. His listed attorney, Todd Leventhal of Las Vegas, did not respond to emails and phone calls seeking comment.

Hennen’s trajectory might seem improbable for a guy from a hard-luck city outside Pittsburgh, with a lengthy criminal record that includes cocaine dealing. Yet in a few short years, fueled by the explosion of legalized sports betting, Hennen remade himself into a jet-setting “betfluencer,” attracting tens of thousands of followers with his apparent luck and lavish lifestyle, often posting from his longtime home in Philadelphia.

The city played a large role in Hennen’s rise, as documented in public records, through interviews, and in archived posts from Hennen’s personal Instagram page, which he made private over the weekend.

Before moving to Las Vegas in 2023, Hennen was a courtside regular at Philadelphia 76ers games. At Rivers Casino, his gambling accelerated, and he was making six-figure wagers at the riverfront gaming hall.

By the time he moved to Vegas, he had built a social network following that included pro athletes, sports bettors and middleweight boxing champion Chris Eubank Jr. In the last few years he regularly posted Instagram videos of visits to luxurious overseas casinos or dinners and birthday celebrations with Eubank and other associates.

Hennen claimed on Instagram to gamble $1 million in any given week — although by his own admission he often netted only a fraction of that. Betting slips he posted online since 2020 show at least a combined $2 million in wagers.

His actual winnings, however, could range wildly from week to week. In September 2023, as federal prosecutors were already homing in on co-conspirators in the prop bet with Rozier, Hennen posted a warning to his followers on Instagram. He had just come off a weekend that looked lucrative, cashing in $1.2 million — in reality, he had netted about $50,000 after his losses.

“Everybody keeps saying ‘oh my god, Shane, ‘you won a million dollars on Sunday’ … but let me explain something to you: that is not the case by far,” he wrote. “People think betting sports is easy. No, it’s not easy … There’s gonna be highs, and there’s gonna be lows.”

The Pittsburgh card shark

Growing up in Washington, Pa., a city of about 13,000 residents outside Pittsburgh, Hennen gravitated toward gambling even as a teenager, a pastime he shared with his brother and the grandfather who raised them.

“I’ve been rich and broke 1000 times since I was 16 when I started doing this,” he wrote on Instagram this year. “When I gamble I don’t look at money as money. I look at it as bullets and as long as you got bullets you always got a shot.”

But that fondness for gambling led to trouble. In 2006, at age 21, he was sentenced to six months’ probation on criminal charges linked to the alleged operation of illegal video gaming devices in Allegheny County, court records show.

His run-ins with the law soon grew more serious. Hennen turned himself in to police in 2009 after allegedly stabbing another man in the neck with a box cutter during an altercation at a nightclub in Pittsburgh’s Southside red-light district, according to news reports.

That same year, federal prosecutors charged him with possession and intent to distribute 500 grams of cocaine he was caught with in a Wendy’s parking lot down the street from Meadows Casino, just north of his hometown.

Hennen served a reduced sentence after turning state’s witness in the prosecution of another Pittsburgh-area drug dealer, Franco Badini. Badini is serving a 20-year sentence in federal prison, while Hennen received 30 months plus four years’ federal probation.

After his release in 2013, probation records show, Hennen joined his grandfather in Pensacola, Fla., allegedly finding work as a sales rep for a seafood wholesaler.

But subsequent filings show that he soon found a more lucrative income stream as a professional gambler.

His probation officer advised that pro gambling was “not a real job,” court records show, while unusually conceding that Hennen “appears to be a talented card player.” The records also show Hennen sought permission to travel to Las Vegas to play in the 2014 World Series of Poker. Although the court denied his request, “the defendant traveled to Las Vegas anyway,” earning a technical violation to his probation.

In 2015, public records show, Hennen had moved to an apartment building near Northern Liberties, nearly across the street from Rivers Casino.

Court records show he claimed to have been diagnosed with kidney cancer in an unsuccessful bid to get out of his remaining probation. He was picked up in a DUI arrest in Missouri the following year along with $14,000 in cash, which he acknowledged were gambling winnings.

In his telling, it was all just part of his turnaround story.

“My story is filled with broken pieces, bad decisions and some ugly truths,” he posted on Instagram in 2019. “It is also filled with a major comeback and peace in my soul.”

New player in town

Within a few years after the 2018 legalization of sports betting, Hennen took his game to the next level.

Soon, he was posting videos of getaways to Monaco and Dubai, favoring an upscale Cirque du Soleil-style stage show called the Billionaire Society. And he often built his earnings at Philadelphia and Atlantic City casino sportsbooks.

Steven Farrell, who runs a Fishtown-based video production company that makes comedic advertisements, recalled meeting the gambler at their shared apartment complex, the Poplar, a former Quaker Oats plant near Northern Liberties.

Farrell bumped into Hennen several years ago at the building’s rooftop pool, along with his late French bulldog, Shugg. He was fascinated to learn about Hennen’s profession and was invited to join him courtside at a Sixers game.

“He was a really nice guy, always in a good mood, and a dog lover,” Farrell said. “And he always used to take these beautiful women to courtside games. I felt so honored by him taking me to a game when a beautiful woman wasn’t available.”

Farrell also recalled Hennen’s preternatural ability to pick winners.

“One time I said, ‘Can you give me one of your picks?’ ” he recalled. “I made $500.”

That was chump change for Hennen by 2022, according to his social media posts. He had been betting big at the Rivers Casino in-house sports lounge, called the BetRivers Sportsbook. He started an online betting consultancy with an Instagram page called “Sugar Shane Wins,” featuring big-ticket sportsbook picks interspersed with shots of Hennen on private jets or sitting courtside.

One screenshot from a Sixers game shows Hennen holding a Rivers betting slip for a $112,000 wager on the Philly team to win by three in their Nov. 12, 2022, matchup against the Atlanta Hawks. (The Sixers won by 13 points.)

Often decked out in Louis Vuitton threads and Rolexes, Hennen posted receipts from his five- and six-figure bets the way others would post photos of their pets or children.

Jerome Bellissima, a weekly regular at the BetRivers Sportsbook, said that level of action was highly unusual for a mid-market casino that caters mostly to casual gamblers.

Bellissima said that the amounts Hennen was betting indicated that he had been vetted by floor managers and had brought in serious money to the casino — enough to cover any losses. (A Rivers representative declined to comment.)

“Most of the bettors here are small bettors,” he said. “We’re not in New York or Las Vegas.”

Trouble behind the scenes

Hennen was riding high by the time he decamped for Las Vegas in 2023. In one video he posted, he is visible on a private jet with a duffel bag counting up bands of cash — one million dollars, he boasted.

In promotional videos, where he instructed others to gamble with a system, he spoke in a distinctly Northeastern patois that acquaintances came to see as part of the “Sugar Shane” brand.

“Regular people might just bet their favorite team, you know? Where they’re from, et cetera, et cetera,” Hennen said in November 2023. “We don’t have no favorite team. Every time we bet our money, that’s our favorite team. Whoever our money is on.”

Behind the glitz and glamour, trouble was brewing.

In 2023, professional poker player Wesley “Wes Side” Fei accused a fellow player and Hennen on social media of running a poker rigging game that scammed him out of millions. Fei posted photos of Hennen, who he claimed was using the alias “Colin” — his brother’s name.

Then, last year, the gambling industry watchdog Integrity Compliance 360 alerted regulators to unusual bets placed on six Temple University basketball games that took place that year. The last, against Alabama-Birmingham in March 2024, saw such an unusual surge in action that the Borgata, in Atlantic City, canceled bets for the game.

About six months later, it emerged that the National Collegiate Athletic Association had launched an investigation and that federal authorities were investigating Temple player Hysier Miller as part of an alleged point-shaving scheme. The player was removed from the team not long after.

Then Porter, the former Raptors center, was banned for life from the NBA, after the league’s own internal investigation into another bet-rigging scheme. A few months later, Porter pleaded guilty to federal charges that he had conspired with other men to fake injuries for profit.

One of those conspirators — Lansdale resident Mahmud Mollah — was charged last October in yet another fraud case that alleged that Porter was drowning in gambling debts to Mollah’s associate. The group allegedly hatched a plan at Resorts Casino Hotel in Atlantic City to place bets using Mollah’s phone that would be realized by Porter faking injuries in order to withdraw early from several matches, but the plan went awry after gaming companies noticed the irregular betting.

The complaint states that Porter had faked an eye injury in a January 2024 game and advised co-conspirators he planned to withdraw early from a subsequent game against the Clippers.

“Hit unders for the big numbers. I told [a co-conspirator] no blocks no steals. I’m going to play first 2-3 minute stint off the bench then when I get subbed out tell them my eye killing me again,” he wrote to the men, in intercepted text messages.

Seemingly, the cases were unrelated. But they would turn out to have one person in common: Hennen.

‘Never change’

In January 2025, Hennen was stopped with $10,000 in his pocket while attempting to board a one-way flight to Panama, en route to Colombia, where he claimed he was getting dental treatment. He was charged in connection with an illegal betting scheme that used advance knowledge furnished by NBA players to fix bets.

Although this indictment makes mention only of an unnamed NBA player, the details match those in Porter’s own federal indictment. Screenshots of the texts from Porter to Mollah and his debtors were in fact being sent along to Hennen, according to authorities, along with betting slips for the same game, allegedly placed via proxies.

This was just a sliver of a larger betting racket that the feds alleged last week in their indictment included a nationwide network of proxies and “illicit financial transactions and fraudulent sports wagers totaling millions of dollars.”

In February, Sports Illustrated reported that the investigation into Porter was also linked to the earlier NCAA investigation into bet rigging. Then, a bombshell indictment unsealed last week in New York, which included 34 defendants in multiple states, shed even more light on Hennen’s alleged activities.

Court records show that Hennen, who was named in both recent indictments, has been negotiating a plea deal with the government since his arrest in January.

About a week before news broke of the big federal indictment, Hennen was also back on social media, posing in front of Turnberry Towers, just off the Las Vegas Strip.

“Never change,” he wrote in the photo caption. “I’m to [sic] stuck in my ways.”