Spook liked to brag.
He brushed shoulders with some of the biggest names in the NBA, he said. He jetted to Sin City routinely to gamble with them. He shot dice with players in hotel rooms.
Thomas Sawyer, a Drug Enforcement Administration task force officer, heard Eric “Spook” Earnest boast about his connections to NBA players and other famous athletes during four months of wiretaps while dismantling a St. Louis drug ring nearly 20 years ago. At the time, he dismissed it as false bravado.
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“We all thought he was full of s—,” Sawyer recalled of Earnest’s frequent name-dropping.
With ties to the Black Mafia Family and a spate of prior felony convictions, Earnest, 53, was well-known to law enforcement throughout the early aughts. But his connection to the NBA burst into public view last week after he was named in two federal gambling indictments involving an insider sports betting scheme and rigged, illegal poker games.
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