by Josh Luchs
It was an expensive shit storm. The legal bills kept coming like a tidal wave—$6,000, $7,000—to the point where I had to take out a second mortgage. Fortunately, my wife and my in-laws were 100 percent behind me, telling me to get what I was owed. And Steve Feldman agreed with my position that there was no basis for Gary not paying except to try to wear me down to a lower settlement.
The lawsuit drama dragged on from 2005 to early 2008, until we were a couple of months from the trial I’d thought would never happen. I did get a settlement offer from Gary but it was more like attempted blackmail in an extortion letter. He said I should take about $50,000 or he’d go to the NFLPA with a complaint that I’d withheld a player’s commission money from him. I was comparing that “offer” (or threat) to $170,000 owed in commissions to date, plus future commissions for players we shared, including a new deal for Terrell Suggs that had the potential to earn me as much as $700,000 if Suggs played out his contract. All together, it was over $1,000,000 owed vs. $50,000 offered. Gary’s specific threat was that he would file a grievance with the NFLPA against Keenan Howry for nonpayment of the $5,300 fee (even though he’d billed Howry for more than $9,000), which would theoretically trigger a breach of fiduciary duty action by the union against me. My lawyers thought it was a ridiculous threat. It was transparent that Gary knew the money was sitting in trust; and furthermore, they argued the NFLPA would not get involved in a dispute between agents that did not impact any players. Gary just wanted to use the union rules to gain an advantage in the civil proceeding, not really follow through with an NFLPA action against Howry. I didn’t accept his offer and he filed the grievance.
In the end, the case that we never thought would go to trial, went to trial. And in a matter that was supposed to be cut and dried in my favor, the jury ruled against me and found no breach of contract. Plus, whoever lost at trial had to pay the other’s attorney’s fees. Bottom-line: In large part due to the attorney’s mishandling of the $5,300 Howry check, instead of getting $1,000,000 and more in commissions, with the cost of appeal and interest, I now owed $650,000 to Wichard’s lawyers. I ended up suing my attorney for malpractice (Trope had bowed out). The lawyer’s insurance company offered a settlement to pay Wichard and the new lawyer’s contingency. I won, if you can call it that, but it was hardly the end of the bad news. I still had the NFLPA complaint to face.
Suge Knight’s “Stepson”: The Last Player We Recruited Together
The legal mess with Gary Wichard was a major distraction, but I still had a business to run—in fact, with the prospect of losing money, I needed to be more effective than ever. So I kept on recruiting. As it turns out, the last player Steve and I would recruit together was Chauncey Washington from USC. (In fact, by the time Chauncey was ready to officially sign with us, the NFLPA had already dropped its final hammer on my head.) Steve called and asked me to meet Chauncey at a rental car place in Los Angeles. I was thinking Budget or Avis for a nice midsize to get him back and forth to workouts. Instead, I met Chauncey at Black and White Rental Cars in Beverly Hills, an outfit that specializes in luxury vehicles. Chauncey explained that his “step-dad” wanted him to “roll in style” but due to his step-dad’s “current situation,” they needed me to put it on my credit card.
Chauncey promised me that we’d go right over to the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills, where his step-dad would give me the cash to cover a one-week rental. This plan had all the makings of a disaster, and I felt a sense of déjà disaster: I’d lived this b.s. before. At least I had the good sense to increase the insurance limits on my American Express card before Chauncey got behind the wheel of his $100,000 Mercedes. He drove me over to the hotel, where we met the step-dad he kept talking about, a man who turned out to be none other than the notorious rap mogul (and ex-convict) Marion “Suge” Knight.
Ensconced in a massive hotel suite, the infamous rap impresario Suge came to the door wrapped in a white terry-cloth robe, then perched on a chair in the middle of the room, flanked by Asian girls performing manicures and pedicures on his digits. My déjà disaster alarms were going nonstop. I jokingly asked if he’d mind closing the French doors to his balcony, a reference to the crazy story of Suge hanging rapper Vanilla Ice off a balcony over the rights to the hit song “Ice Ice Baby.” Suge laughed and then we traded a few old war stories; Doc Daniels had actually represented Suge when he was a replacement player for the Rams during the 1987 strike. He even remembered that I was Doc’s “Jew-boy.”
The whole time I was waiting for Chauncey to bring up the cash for the rental car, but it wasn’t happening. Suge said he was heading to Las Vegas for the weekend and I should go along for some fun. Maybe when I was single and fifteen years younger and dumber, I would’ve gone, but not now with a wife and two daughters. I could just imagine that call to my wife: “Jen, honey, I’m gonna skip dinner tonight and in fact I’ll be gone all weekend so could you do me a favor and fill in for me as a coach for our daughter’s soccer team cuz I’m gonna hop a private jet to Vegas and whoop it up with Suge Knight? Okay, honey?” Not okay. Chauncey never did ask his step-dad for the money, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to ask Suge for it. I left empty-handed and financially responsible for a $2,500-per-week rental car. Sunday morning, I read in the paper that Suge had been arrested that weekend in Vegas on a domestic violence charge. At least I’d made one good call.
An entire week went by and as I’d feared, Chauncey didn’t return the car. I started fielding daily calls from Black and White Rental Car. Then another week, and another $2,500 on my AmEx card, went by. (Hey, at least I was earning a lot of reward points.) The next week Chauncey was leaving for the Combine in Indianapolis so I figured/hoped he would return the car at that time. Chauncey did leave for the Combine, but he drove himself to the airport and parked the car at some obscure lot while he was in Indianapolis for the week. Another $2,500 in rewards points. All told, Chauncey burned around $20,000 on the rental car, all on my card. Lucky for us he earned almost twice that in rookie football card deals with Topps, Upper Deck, and others, so he’d have little trouble paying it back … if I could get him to sign the deals before the predraft deadline, which I did but it was no small task.
We got out without too much personal damage. Chauncey was a seventh-round pick of the Jacksonville Jaguars and received a modest signing bonus. But dealing with Chauncey was yet another reminder of how ugly the business can be—an unfortunate end to my work with Steve Feldman.
Justice NFLPA-style
Just before the trial, I received a letter from the NFLPA informing me that they had begun their own inquiry for breach of fiduciary duty—Gary’s wild threat—citing my having made inaccurate statements in my depositions. I hired another lawyer, this time David Cornwell, one of the nation’s leading sports attorneys (along with his associate, Brandon Witkow), as Cornwell had represented NFL athletes, agents, and even the league itself. Cornwell contended that the fiduciary duty breach claim would normally come from the one owed the duty, which would’ve meant Keenan Howry. But the union, by way of an organization called CARD (Committee on Agent Representation and Discipline), took the position that they were acting on behalf of all players in the union, that the damage was to their overall membership and marketplace. I never spoke to CARD and nobody from the NFLPA ever contacted me or Keenan Howry. But they were supposedly weighing the facts of the case.
Meantime, Hugh Dodson, COO of the Gersh Agency, who had become licensed as an agent, was at the NFLPA meeting in northern California. On a huge screen, in front of a large group of other agents, the union officials projected a notice that I had been suspended for twelve months and fined $25,000 for misappropriating funds and lying in depositions. They posted it before I’d even responded to their letter and before informing me of their decision. A mad agent scramble for the phones ensued, people trying to pick off my clients. The body wasn’t even cold and already the vultures were circling. Within minutes I was getting calls from my clients, who’d been getting calls f
rom agents. Eventually I received a letter notifying me of what everyone else already knew. That’s the due process of the NFLPA. You can appeal, but you’re neutered in terms of recruitment while you’re appealing. No one wants to sign with a guy who might be suspended.
Naturally, we exercised my right for an appeal. Cornwell made my case to the arbitrator, Roger Kaplan, who’d handled almost every case for the NFLPA for the past twenty-five years. Kaplan was hired by the union and paid by the union and, not surprisingly, he rarely disagreed with the union. He extended the hearing from one day to two because he said he had a hot date lined up while he was in town. The first hearing was in L.A., the second at his office outside of Washington, D.C., which cost me about $10,000 in additional legal fees and travel. A few months later he rendered his decision. No shock: He upheld the suspension, and even the full amount of the fine. So now I owed a $25,000 fine; I’d lost my job at Gersh; and I had almost no clients. It hurt Steve, too. He lost most of the clients he had with me; he hung on to his older ones, but a lot of those were close to retirement. I paid $12,500 to the Players’ Trust and the other $12,500 to another NFLPA charity. I was broke, with no college degree, and I had a wife and two little kids, ages four and six. Besides the death of my parents, it was the lowest moment of my life.
Here I was, a guy who had done all kinds of things wrong in the football agent business. I’d paid college players, given them loans they’d never repay, paid money to runners to get me to players; I’d cooked up information for Game Plan and Playbook sales materials, I’d gotten questions and answers to Wonderlic tests, I’d picked up the tab on debauched trips to Las Vegas. All that and I wound up getting suspended for giving a small check to my attorney to hold—not for cashing it or spending it, just for having him hold it! The string of lawyers I’d hired made My Cousin Vinny look like Clarence Darrow. One bumble after another, and finally a kangaroo court controlled by the NFLPA. It was a travesty of justice. Or … it was my comeuppance. I didn’t get nailed for what I had done. I got nailed for something else. In the symmetry of life, maybe I got what I deserved.
I was suspended for twelve months but it might as well have been a career death sentence. Twelve months of not being able to recruit players or negotiate on behalf of current players is a lifetime. Other agents recruiting against me in the future would’ve used the arbitrator’s decision as a reason players shouldn’t sign with me. That guy stole a player’s check—ask the NFLPA. I was done at Gersh; and I was done with Steve Feldman, despite his personal loyalty. The day I received the decision on my appeal—an unequivocal “no”—my wife walked into our den and said to me, “Josh, there’s a career open house at Marcus and Millichap, the commercial real estate company, right down the street from us. You should go check it out. You like real estate, you like people, you know how to sell.” Despite all I’d been through, at my lowest moment, my wife, my partner, my moral compass had total faith in me. She didn’t need to read the NFLPA decision. She said she didn’t want to waste another minute of our lives on it. I followed her gentle nudge. That same day I walked into the real estate office, signed up for training, and started over—clean. End of my life as a football agent, start of my new life as a commercial real estate agent.
Postscript: Twelve months later, having paid my fines, I was reinstated as an NFLPA agent and had to decide if I’d stick with selling commercial properties or dive back into the cesspool. For once, I stayed on the shore.
CHAPTER 9
Coming Clean
About nine months after I’d been suspended, and after nearly twenty years as a sports agent, I thought long and hard and decided it was time to come clean about the whole business, the way I had done it and the way other agents do it. George Dohrmann, Pulitizer Prize–winning sports writer, had spent months trying to convince me to go on the record about my experiences. Eventually, he persuaded me, and it became a cover story in Sports Illustrated, entitled “Confessions of an Agent.” I named thirty former college players who took money or accepted improper benefits from me. At the end of the story, the magazine included responses from those mentioned, reprinted below:
SPORTS ILLUSTRATED—OCTOBER 18, 2010
CONFESSIONS OF AN AGENT—RESPONSES
• When informed of the allegation that he had accepted money from Luchs, Kanavis McGhee asked SI to call back the next day. He did not return subsequent phone and e-mail messages from SI.
• Greg Townsend confirmed the details of his relationship with Luchs.
• Chuck Webb could not be reached for comment (SI left messages for Webb through his family).
• Mel Agee, Harold (Doc) Daniels, Chris Mims, Travis Claridge and Leon Bender are deceased.
• Carl Greenwood, Othello Henderson, Matt Soenksen, Chris Alexander, Bruce Walker, Jonathan Ogden and Singor Mobley confirmed receiving money or extra benefits from Luchs.
• Jamir Miller, Tony Banks and John Rushing declined to comment.
• Ryan Fien, Joel Steed and Torey Hunter said they did not receive money from Luchs.
• Vaughn Parker said he knew Luchs but had no comment as to whether he took money from Luchs.
• Greg Thomas, Delon Washington and Darick Holmes did not respond to phone messages.
• Phalen Pounds said Luchs was “a good guy” but declined to comment as to whether he took money.
• Rob Waldrop denied that Luchs paid him. He recalled that he had lunch with Luchs and that Luchs offered to pay a friend in an effort to get to Waldrop, but he said that he did not accept any money.
• Ryan Leaf declined to comment on specific allegations. “I remember Josh,” Leaf said in a statement. “As I recall, he was an old hometown friend of one or two of my teammates and we all hung out a bit. I don’t remember him aspiring to be an agent. We were all about the same age and we were interested in having a good time more than anything else.”
• R. Jay Soward confirmed receiving money from Luchs.
• Gary Wichard’s lawyer, Howard Silber, said his client declined to comment.
• Mel Kiper denied that it was prearranged for him to call during the Willie Howard meeting or any other. “I would never have called Gary, but Gary and other agents often call me and ask me to speak to players,” said Kiper. “Gary is my friend, but I do that all the time for many different agents. I give players my opinion of them as football players. But I would never promote Gary or any other agent to a player.” As for the belief among some agents that he favors Wichard’s clients, Kiper said, “My player ratings are not related to my relationship with Gary or any other agent. There are many examples of players Gary represented who I have not ranked highly.” (Howard confirmed to SI Luchs’s account of Kiper’s calling during Howard’s meeting with Luchs and Wichard.)
• John Blake’s lawyer, William H. Beaver II, said his client declined to comment.
• Kenyon Coleman declined to comment.
• Jeremy Shockey did not respond to messages left through the Saints or his agent, Drew Rosenhaus.
• Through a New York Jets spokesperson, Santonio Holmes denied taking money from any agent while in college or telling Luchs and Steve Feldman that he had taken money. Feldman confirmed to SI that Holmes told him and Luchs that an agent was paying him.
I was interviewed by Bernard Goldberg on HBO’s Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel. And shortly after, I started writing this book. It was time to tell the truth. After the Sports Illustrated story ran, the NFLPA called an emergency meeting of CARD and, citing that, among other things, I’d urinated for a player when I was sixteen years old, permanently revoked my certification. It was like wasting a bullet on a dead horse. Emergency meeting? For a guy who’d just walked away from the business? No need for future appeals. That’s okay. I was done.
Since I went public with how the sports business really works, I’ve gone from being just another agent doing what agents do to a whistle-blower, double agent (pun-intended), reformer, crusader, and expert on the dark side. I’ve been on co
untless radio and TV shows, have been interviewed by magazines inside and outside of sports, and ironically, as a rule-breaker have been asked to serve on or speak at numerous sports law conferences, interestingly on the subject of ethics.
Shortly after my story was published, I was invited by the NCAA to speak at their so-called compliance meetings, to help educate the very body whose rules and values agents like me were—and still are—flouting. I assisted in some high-profile investigations. ESPN.com ran an Associated Press story on October 27, 2010, excerpted below.
NCAA SEEKS INSIGHT ON ROGUE AGENTS
INDIANAPOLIS—The NCAA is taking a new approach to weeding out rogue agents … Spokeswoman Stacey Osburn confirmed in an e-mail to The Associated Press that the governing body had also been gathering information from former agent Josh Luchs.
The goal is to dissuade agents from providing improper benefits to college players—and players from taking benefits and running to the NFL. The panel seeking solutions is looking at a wide range of possibilities.
… The union [NFLPA], league, NCAA and other entities are discussing ways to halt the problem of agents, and college players, who break the rules. A series of high-profile cases are currently under investigation by the NCAA.
From then on, it’s been a flood. In January 2011, I spoke at the University of Oregon School of Law in Eugene, Oregon. I was nervous about how law students would respond to someone like me. They’re there to learn the “ideal,” the law, and the way things are supposed to be. What I was talking about was the opposite, the very “real” way things are, not how they should be. Right away, one thing struck me as odd. Despite the fact that the university was putting on the Sports and Entertainment Law Conference, there was no participation, nor were there even observers from, the University of Oregon Athletic Department. The way the Warsaw Sports Review, published by the University’s Marketing Center, put it afterward was: “JOSH LUCHS JOINS UNIVERSITY COMPLIANCE OFFICERS AT UNIVERSITY OF OREGON LAW CONFERENCE … Luchs, who has recently been in the spotlight for his tell-all … where he confessed to paying players, was strategically placed between the Oregon State Associate AD and the Washington State Associate AD to add to the controversy of the panel.” In a strange twist, I also recruited another ex-client of mine to speak on the panel: former Oregon wide receiver Keenan Howry (of the infamous $5,300 check in the Luchs vs. Wichard case).