Rat emoji lands man accused of illegal sports betting behind bars

NEW YORK – A man accused of conspiring with an NBA player to bet on basketball games was sent to jail on Aug 11 after prosecutors said he had posted an emoji of a rat on Instagram to intimidate witnesses in the case.

Mob films have popularised the rat as a symbol of the reviled government informant.

In federal court in Brooklyn on Aug 11, prosecutors said the post was part of a striking pattern by the man, De’Niro Laster, to intimidate witnesses and obstruct justice.

Prosecutors said Laster had learnt about statements that anonymous witnesses had made to the government.

Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall, who is overseeing the case, said the connotation of the emoji was clear and revoked Laster’s bail. David I. Berman, a federal prosecutor, characterised Laster’s conduct as “utterly egregious”.

Laster, who is facing charges related to insider trading on sports bets, had been out on bond since he was charged in October 2025.

According to federal prosecutors, he conspired with his close friend, NBA player Terry Rozier, to wager that Rozier would underperform in several key statistical categories during a basketball game in March 2023.

After collecting the winnings, prosecutors say, Laster drove from Pennsylvania to Rozier’s home in North Carolina, where they counted the cash. Both men have pleaded not guilty to all charges.

In addition to posting the rat emoji, prosecutors say Laster spoke with a co-defendant, who was not named, advising him not to cooperate with the government.

Prosecutors say Laster also tried to obstruct justice while he was under federal investigation in September 2024, before he was indicted.

It is not clear when a rat first came to refer to a person perceived to be a traitor, though its usage is splattered across politics and popular culture, particularly in depictions of organized crime.

President Donald Trump infamously referred to Michael Cohen, his former lawyer and fixer, as a “rat”.

In the final scene of The Departed, a Martin Scorsese film depicting turncoats embedded in the Irish mob and the Boston Police Department, a rat scurries across a balcony, a thinly veiled reference to deceit.

M. Evan Corcoran, a lawyer for Laster, suggested that the emoji, which he also called “rat cartoons”, was harmless. He said it would be a “manifest injustice” to jail Laster.

“Sometimes a rat emoji is just a rat emoji,” Corcoran said.

While conducting legal research, DeArcy Hall said she had found other instances of judges imposing harsher sentences on defendants who were found to refer to government witnesses as “rats.”

She did not buy Corcoran’s argument.

“Am I to just treat this rat emoji as innocuous?” DeArcy Hall asked Corcoran. “Is that your argument? Because if it is, it’s a bad one.”

• This article originally appeared in The New York Times.