The Last Temptation of Rick Pitino

by Michael Sokolove

  In April 2014, Dawkins was hired by International Management Advisors, a Cleveland-based firm with a clientele of NBA players. It was headed by Kurt Schloeppler, LeBron James’s former financial advisor. Dawkins became the firm’s “executive director of sports and entertainment.” He was twenty-one years old.

  Despite the lofty title, Dawkins was what anyone in the industry would recognize as a runner. He recruited clients. It was what he had been doing; now he was just working for someone else. In documents related to litigation after Dawkins was dismissed a year into the job, IMA defined his role as “developing relationships with future NBA players such that the players would select IMA to serve as their agent and/or financial advisor during and after their NBA playing career.” It made clear that his hunting grounds were to be college campuses, among supposedly amateur athletes who by NCAA rules are prohibited from signing with agents or accepting any benefits from them.

  After Dawkins left IMA, he went to work for Andy Miller, the NBA agent. IMA’s civil action, which has since been settled, alleged that Dawkins was two-timing IMA—steering prospects to Miller while he was on the road at their expense. (Miller was the defendant in the suit.) “By January 2015, it became apparent that Dawkins was actually representing [Miller’s] interests, not IMA’s, when interacting with prospects, and he could no longer be trusted as the Executive Director of Sports and Entertainment,” the complaint said. IMA was also seeking reimbursement of the $42,722 of Uber fares allegedly charged by Dawkins while using an American Express card belonging to one of its clients, NBA guard Elfrid Payton.

  Recruiting is the lifeblood of agents, just as it is for college coaches. NBA agents generally take commissions of 4 percent of playing contracts. Rookie contracts, which last for either two or three years, are “slotted,” meaning they are set by a player’s draft position, so an agent does not have to do much negotiating. The dollars are already determined. Basketball agents maintain that their connections with NBA general managers and expertise at marketing players to teams enhance their clients’ draft positions, and therefore the size of their contracts.

  Competition for clients is rugged, and Dawkins’s new employer, Andy Miller, had already been penalized for playing outside the rules. In 2002, a jury ordered Miller to pay another agent, Eric Fleisher, $4.6 million, after Fleisher accused him of improperly poaching sixteen clients, including Garnett and Chauncey Billups. (Miller appealed, and the two agents ended up settling for an undisclosed sum.)

  Eight years later an arbitrator ordered Miller to pay $40,000 in damages to another agent whose client he had taken, allegedly by working in concert with the player’s high school coach. The financial penalty was modest, but as a law professor, Gabriel Feldman, director of Tulane’s sports law program, noted in a New York Times story, “It’s rare for an agent to successfully sue another agent for client-poaching, or tampering, or tortious interference, or whatever you want to call it.” Miller had now lost two such suits.

  Miller had represented twenty-six first-round draft choices and negotiated more than $1 billion in contracts. But after the retirement of Garnett and some of his other high-paid properties, his business was perceived to be, if not in decline, then not quite as booming as it once had been. He had endured all manner of challenges in his nearly quarter century in the business, including the contempt of many of his fellow agents. But what Miller ultimately could not survive was the young man from Saginaw he hired to help find him new clients.

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  The FBI’s probe of college basketball began by happenstance, which is not unusual. Law enforcement agents often start off in one direction, with a single suspect and a discrete set of facts, and then are led to something else—a bigger case or sometimes just a more interesting one. In this instance, they were initially looking into the business practices of Louis Martin Blazer III, known as Marty, a Pittsburgh financial advisor with a client list of professional athletes. His company, Blazer Capital, touted itself as a “concierge” firm that in addition to investment guidance took care of clients’ bill-paying, developed and managed their personal budgets, and assisted in tax preparation.

  Blazer had a side interest in moviemaking, and in 2010 he began to raise money for two films, one of which was named Mafia, the Movie. He created a financial instrument related to its funding, “Mafia LLC” (a name that seems preordained to attract interest from law enforcement), but struggled to find backers.

  The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil case against him, alleging, “To compensate for the shortfall, Blazer simply took funds from client accounts over which he had control and used the money to finance the films.” When one client protested about the unauthorized use of $550,000 and threatened legal action, Blazer, who had previously worked at Smith Barney and Merrill Lynch, returned the client’s money and took the same amount from a different client, according to the SEC complaint. The government referred to Blazer’s shuffling of funds as “Ponzi-like payments.”

  This, of course, is the type of activity that, once discovered, puts an individual in serious legal jeopardy. Criminal charges followed the civil action lodged by the SEC. As a way of mitigating his peril and lessening the potential penalties and jail time, Blazer told federal agents that he could bring them a new case—evidence of criminal behavior in the world of college basketball recruiting. He turned state’s evidence and began operating as an undercover agent. “He was inserted,” the acting U.S. attorney at the time, Joon Kim, explained on the day the NCAA case was announced. In the documents filed by the U.S. Department of Justice, Blazer is referred to as “CW-1”—cooperating witness number one.

  Under the direction of federal agents, Blazer secretly made audio and video recordings of his meetings with college coaches, players, and others in the college basketball universe. His phone conversations with them were recorded. He would eventually team up with an unsuspecting Dawkins, but the first person he pulled into his web was Rashan Michel, a singularly colorful figure—a former NBA referee turned bespoke tailor to players and coaches.

  A whole industry has grown up around the needs of lavishly paid professional athletes. Agents and financial advisors, of course. Assistants (often family members) who live with them and attend to day-to-day household management. Nutritionists and physical trainers. Moving consultants who specialize in quickly relocating them when they are abruptly traded and find them homes in their new cities and even private schools for their children.

  Michel officiated his first NBA game in 1995, at twenty-one years old, after the league locked out its regular referees in a labor dispute. He was hired full time in 1997 but let go four years later because his performance put him near the bottom of the league’s rankings of its officials. (He continued to officiate men’s and women’s NCAA games as recently as the 2016–17 season.) After he lost his NBA job, he became a salesman for high-end menswear, and then went through an intensive six-month tailoring course in Toronto. He set up shop in Atlanta and made suits for NBA and NFL players as well as for coaches—in particular, college basketball coaches. In 2016, he traveled to the Final Four in Houston, where he offered “bespoke garment packages” that included a deal for four suits, four shirts, and four ties for $4,000.

  Michel claimed to have outfitted the first seven picks in the 2014 NFL draft. A writer for HuffPost spent the day with him as he received players in his hotel suite, tending to last-minute refinements in their ensembles, and produced a breathless account. “Sprawled on the bed were tailored made shirts with each of Rashan’s clients’ initials embedded on the sleeves alongside a multitude of socks, ties and men accessories,” wrote Marjoriet T. Matute. “Along the counter were jewels and sparkling diamonds lined up to perfection as you would find in a fine showcase. Accompanying the array of designer clothing were ladies luxuries for those lucky women escorting the nation’s top picks to the prestigious Radio City Music Hall.” An associate of his said, �
��We are creating a complete turn-key experience and concierge service dressing them from head to toe.”

  Michel had made news of a different kind three years earlier when he got into a fistfight courtside at an Atlanta Hawks game with retired NBA Hall of Famer Dominique Wilkins. The beef was over money he believed Wilkins owed him for tailoring. (He had previously tweeted at Wilkins, “Pay your debts, poser.”) He was arrested—Michel’s mug shot from the city lockup shows him with a shiner and a big lump under his left eye, indicating he got the worst of the fracas—but the charges were dropped, and he sued Wilkins for damages. (The case was settled out of court.)

  Marty Blazer knew Rashan Michel through a common friend, a sports agent, according to the criminal complaint. Michel, unaware that Blazer was secretly working with the FBI, offered to set him up with college coaches who would accept bribes in return for bringing their players to his financial services firm. In a conversation recorded by the government, he says, “The good thing about it is, I got all the college coaches right now because guess what, I’m the one that’s with them. . . . I make all their suits.”

  He added that he had access to the locker room and the players and said, “The fucking basketball guys [get] way more money than these fucking football guys. . . . We can get us goddamn ten basketball players in the next five years and we [just] sit back and do absolutely nothing.”

  The two of them allegedly entered into a scheme with Chuck Person, an assistant coach at Auburn who had played there in the early 1980s. A teammate of Charles Barkley’s at Auburn, Person was such a dead-eye shooter he was nicknamed “The Rifleman.” He went on to play for fourteen NBA seasons, then served as an assistant coach in the league before being hired on to Auburn head coach Bruce Pearl’s staff in 2014. Like the other assistant coaches charged in the federal case, Person was making good money, an annual salary of $240,000. His pro career ended in 2001, when NBA players were not compensated as highly as now, but he still made close to $23 million in his playing career.

  A theme of the government’s case was the willingness of adults—coaches and others—to leverage their relationships with young players, many of them still in their teens, for personal gain. According to prosecutors, after Michel and Blazer met with Person at a restaurant in Alabama, he agreed to “steer” players to them in return for a $60,000 loan. For every player who agreed to do business with them—to buy suits from Michel and use the financial services of Blazer—some of the loan would be forgiven. Michel allegedly tried to extract additional payments from Blazer in exchange for introducing him to “additional coaches who wished to receive bribe payments.”

  In December 2016, Auburn traveled to New York to play Boston College in a shoe-company-sponsored event called the Under Armour Reunion. They lost the game, 72–71, when an opposing player tipped the ball in with two-tenths of a second left on the clock. In a Manhattan hotel room before the game, Person brought one of his players, whom he considered a surefire NBA prospect, to meet Blazer and Michel—a meeting captured on tape by the FBI. The government’s charging documents quote Person as offering what sounds almost like fatherly advice to his player: “This is how the NBA players get it done, they get early relationships, and they form partnerships, they form trust, you get to know Blazer, you get to know Rashan, a lot like Rashan can get you suits and stuff. . . . You’ll start looking like an NBA player, that’s what you are.” He continued, “Don’t flaunt the stuff you get, and you know, don’t change the way you speak to people, that’s very important, too . . . and character . . . which we talk about all the time.”

  After the meeting, according to the government, and outside the player’s presence, Blazer gave Person $15,000 in a briefcase—money that had been supplied by the FBI.

  The indictment states that Person, before urging his player into a business relationship with Blazer, never asked about Blazer’s qualifications, his client base, or his history of successfully managing money. It also notes dryly that by May 2016, a “simple Internet search” of Blazer’s name would have revealed that he was in hot water with the SEC for alleged securities fraud.

  In other words, the FBI sent a cooperating witness on the road—operating under his own name—whom anyone could have figured out was someone they should not do business with (legitimate business or shady business). The government made a calculation that their targets were not cautious or smart enough to just Google the name “Marty Blazer”—and they were right.

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  When Joon Kim, then the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, stepped up to a podium in September 2017 and dropped his bombshell of a sports story—revealing for the first time that the FBI had been running a two-year probe of NCAA basketball—he decried coaches who “betrayed the trust of their players” and all those who dwelled in the game’s “dark underbelly” and saw kids as business investments. Managers and financial advisors, he said, “were circling blue-chip prospects like coyotes.”

  The probe had been “covert,” he said, and even though it was now out in the open, it was ongoing. He urged those who knew about corruption in college basketball to come forward and anyone guilty of it themselves to turn themselves in. “It’s better for you to be calling us,” he said, “than us to be calling you when we’re ready to charge you.”

  The behaviors described by Kim were cynical and disturbing, but for those versed in the sport, not exactly surprising. Much more shocking was the involvement of federal law enforcement in a realm that previously had been policed, however haphazardly, by the NCAA. If Kim’s words were to be taken at face value, he seemed to betray some naïveté when he said that he hoped the charges would “help keep the sport clean and honest.” No one involved in college basketball would say the game had been clean or honest in their lifetime.

  On the morning of the press conference, FBI agents had already been out on the streets for hours. They arrested ten people charged in the investigation and booked them at the closest federal courthouse. Later that day, they reportedly raided the North Jersey offices of Andy Miller, seized documents, and confiscated his computer. He has not been charged, but after two decades as a top-tier agent, he relinquished his certification from the NBA Players Association, and the union announced that he “was no longer permitted to represent players in contract negotiations.”

  It is important to understand that most of the suspects were not considered by their peers to be especially bad actors. They were mainstream, well known, and well liked. They were part of the basketball fraternity.

  College basketball coaching is a sales job—you sell yourself, the program, its record of sending players into the NBA—and Joon Kim and the FBI collared some of the game’s best salesmen. The coaches he charged shared personality traits with Christian Dawkins: They were extroverts and relentless networkers. They were bullshitters, when the moment called for that particular talent.

  Emanuel Richardson, forty-four, an assistant coach at Arizona known as “Book” (a nickname from childhood because he liked to rummage in his grandmother’s pocketbook), was a basketball lifer who had parlayed a mediocre playing career and superior interpersonal skills into ever better and more lucrative jobs. The criminal complaint quotes him as telling one of his alleged co-conspirators that he took pride in being “a people’s guy, a relationship guy.”

  After playing high school basketball in New York and college ball for three different middling programs, he began coaching with the New York Gauchos, one of the nation’s premier AAU programs, before landing college assistant jobs at Marist, Xavier, and Arizona. A feature story on Richardson described his trademarks as “A hug. A backslap. An extended handshake. A fist bump. Love, in whatever form.” Sean Miller, Arizona’s head coach and his former boss at Xavier, counted on Richardson to recruit back east, and especially in New York, where he retained his hometown connections.

  The Los Angeles Times wrote about Tony Bland, an
other of the defendants, an assistant coach at the University of Southern California before he was fired in the wake of the federal charges, back when he was a junior at L.A.’s Westchester High and a star for a prominent Nike-sponsored AAU team. It was 1997, and the newspaper even then was looking into relationships between the shoe companies and grassroots basketball programs. Bland was personable but, perhaps owing to his youth, unguarded. “If you need something, you just ask,” he told the reporter. “Shoes, shirts, jerseys, hats, socks, you name it. I’ve got shoes still in boxes.”

  The paper quoted several people who observed Bland in action as a USC assistant. “There are a lot of guys who can do X’s and O’s, but there aren’t a lot of guys who can go into Westchester or Compton or Harvard-Westlake and immediately have a connection with a coach or his AAU coach or know someone his parents played with,” said a journalist who covered AAU basketball in San Diego.

  Bland was a connector who could relate to all people at all levels of the game, from young kids on the grassroots circuit up to their fathers and grandfathers. “You go to basketball games and big high school tournaments, Tony knows every kid that’s in the gym,” Pat Roy, the coach at Inglewood High, said. “Every kid wants to come over and shake his hand.”

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  Jim Gatto had an important-sounding title at Adidas. When Kim announced the charges, he said three of the ten defendants were from a major international sporting goods company, “including its global marketing director for basketball.”

  In reality, Gatto was just another denizen of the grassroots world and a regular on the sidelines at tournaments. The son of a high school basketball coach in Queens, he went to work for Adidas a year after graduating from tiny Elmira College in upstate New York, and after twenty-five years with the company, he was making $139,000 a year. He lived in Portland with his wife, a sales associate at Ann Taylor, their two children, and a white Lab named Coach.