The Last Temptation of Rick Pitino

by Michael Sokolove

  Konchalski, the seventy-two-year-old scouting guru, had coached Gatto at a summer basketball camp when he was a teenager and had long been friends with his father. He dutifully attended Gatto’s court appearances to lend support. “He’s a person you would be proud to have as a son,” he said. “He’s a very nice person. They came in early in the morning to arrest him and led him away in handcuffs in front of his children. Why was that necessary? If he’s guilty of something, it’s because he’s part of a corrupt system.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE PLAYBOOK

  If you accept that college basketball is both a sport and a swamp, a coast-to-coast lowland populated by confidence men offering bribes (and not very big ones, by the way, since it does not take much to influence young players and their families), then what Book Richardson, Tony Bland, and Jim Gatto had in common was bad luck. They may not have been engaging in conduct outside the norms of their industry, but they associated with the wrong guy at the wrong time. The same could be said of Rick Pitino and the formerly blue-chip basketball program at the University of Louisville. Terrible luck.

  After Christian Dawkins was arrested, his lawyer, Steve Haney, said, “He’s not an agent, first of all. He is being represented as being this high-powered basketball agent out of Atlanta, Georgia. He’s never been an agent. He doesn’t even have a college degree. He couldn’t qualify to be an agent. He’s twenty-four years old. He lives with his mom and dad.”

  Although Dawkins did have his own apartment in Atlanta and spent time there, the essence of what Haney said was indisputable. By traditional measures, his client was a small-time hustler. But Dawkins’s peripatetic existence, his three iPhones, his ambition and energy, his habit of firing off emails that memorialized everywhere he had been and everyone he had talked to, served to infect and possibly incriminate a wide swath of the recruiting and coaching worlds. Dawkins was not working for the FBI and he was not an undercover agent—or a cooperating witness, like Marty Blazer—but if he had been working in concert with federal law enforcement, he could not possibly have done a better job for them.

  When the charges were announced, it was William Sweeney Jr., assistant director of the FBI’s New York office, who made the statement that sent a wave of paranoia through the ranks of college basketball—“We have your playbook.” They obtained it, largely, through Dawkins.

  There are 351 Division I basketball programs, but a much smaller number that compete for the best prospects. Dawkins knew all the coaches at those schools. He knew the kids on the radar of the top programs and their families. In fact, he had closer relationships inside the homes than most of the coaches doing the recruiting. He knew the fringe figures, including Rashan Michel. (He had bought suits from Michel and liked the quality, but complained that if you ordered just one, he would send you four and expect you to pay.) He moved from one person to the next, meeting whoever it seemed to him could advance his business goals.

  He met Marty Blazer, the Pittsburgh financial advisor, in the spring of 2015. The person who introduced them was Michel. Dawkins began working with Blazer, not knowing of course that Blazer had already been flipped by law enforcement and “inserted” into the recruiting world. Dawkins at this point was employed by the NBA agent Andy Miller and trying to sign clients for him. In early 2017, Dawkins would separate from Miller. Documents filed by federal prosecutors say he was fired; his lawyer, Haney, has said the split was amicable and he continued to do some work with Miller. Either way, Dawkins had long been out in the field, working for Miller and still also hoping to establish his own firm. He always had his eye on the next thing.

  The first meeting documented by the FBI between Dawkins and a college assistant coach was in March 2016, with Lamont Evans, who was then at the University of South Carolina. Like Book Richardson and Tony Bland, Evans had been a journeyman player; he competed for two small colleges before landing a scholarship at Division I Drake, then set off on an odyssey that took him to professional teams in Slovenia, Germany, Finland, and Venezuela. But he paid his dues and moved up in the coaching profession. He would move on from South Carolina in 2017 to take an assistant coaching job at Oklahoma State, signing a three-year, $1.85 million contract.

  At a restaurant near South Carolina’s campus in Columbia, Dawkins met with Evans and Blazer, along with a third man, Munish Sood—a financial advisor in Princeton, New Jersey. Dawkins wanted to set up a financial management firm for athletes with Blazer, and Sood was to be their partner. Dawkins took on the role of instructor, telling his colleagues why it was so important for them to engage coaches like Evans, who serve as gatekeepers to the players, and not just to work though the agents who negotiate playing contracts. As in so many other settings, he was inadvertently giving the feds the playbook.

  “Agents obviously have influence, but you gotta get the college coaches, too,” he said, because “it’s almost like skipping a step if you just deal with agents.” They were discussing a particular player at South Carolina, but Dawkins said that signing him would lead to “five players down the line.” He advised them to “get in bed” with Evans “so now you got complete access to a kid because if the coach says nobody can come around—can’t nobody fucking come around.”

  Dawkins continued with the tutorial. He said the path to securing commitments from college players goes through the assistants because the head coaches “ain’t willing to [take bribes] ’cause they’re making too much money and it’s too risky.” Sood agreed. “In this business,” he said, “all you have is trust.”

  They agreed to pay Evans $2,000 a month, and also to make separate payments that Evans would forward to high school players he was recruiting. At another meeting, Evans spoke of a player he was about to introduce them to as “the motherfucker that’s scoring 22 points a game. . . . NBA people are coming to see him, and I’m getting feedback. He’s a pro.” The whole idea was that Dawkins and company would manage the future earnings of players like him.

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  Christian Dawkins had meetings in restaurants, in hotel rooms, on a boat docked off Manhattan. The FBI tracked him from state to state, location to location. They were granted court-ordered wiretaps of his phones and listened in on his conversations, and when he made new relationships with coaches and others, they tapped the phones of some of those people, too. He was a young man who did a lot of boasting, but that did not seem to bother the people he did business with or make them wary. He had been in the business for years and they granted him his authority.

  The federal documents say that Dawkins enlisted an Adidas consultant, Merl Code, forty-three, into his schemes. Code played point guard for Clemson in the 1990s and came from an outstanding family. He is the grandson of a high school principal and the son of a retired judge and prominent community leader in Greenville, South Carolina, who established a lifetime of firsts—first African American to serve as a municipal judge in his city, first to serve as chairman of the local Chamber of Commerce, first to serve as chairman of the United Way. The younger Code was a respected athlete and student at Clemson, and when he was arrested, a post on one of the university’s sports blogs asked, “Is this our Merl Code?”

  When the government set out to explore possible criminality in college basketball, it had Blazer as an asset, the investment advisor charged with financial fraud who had been turned into a government informant. They gave him a fictional partner, an undercover FBI agent who posed as someone who could supply the operation with money. (He did, at times—FBI money.) As the probe widened, at least one other undercover agent joined the mix. At trial, there are likely to be a number of cooperating witnesses called by the prosecution, including, it is likely, assistant coaches and other basketball insiders who have avoided prosecution by agreeing to help the government.

  The government’s charges portray Code as a willing partner of Dawkins. At a meeting on June 20, 2017, he met with Dawkins, Blazer, and the und
ercover agent posing as Blazer’s business associate at a Manhattan hotel, where Code agreed to identify coaches “who would be willing to accept bribe payments.” At the end of the meeting, the government says, the undercover agent gave Code $5,000 in cash.

  A few weeks later, the FBI listened in on a phone conversation between Code and Dawkins. They were discussing an upcoming trip to a big grassroots tournament, which, like all such events, would attract the coaching staffs at the top programs. Code told Dawkins that he could introduce him to a number of coaches, and said he expected $5,000 for each introduction.

  Dawkins met with Tony Bland, the USC coach, at a hotel room in Las Vegas—a meeting the FBI says was arranged by Code and also attended by Blazer and the undercover agent. Bland was more cautious than some of the others. He said he did not want to “touch” the money intended to go to his current players or ones he was recruiting, but would arrange meetings where Dawkins and his cohorts could deliver it directly. “I can definitely mold the players and put them in the lap of you guys,” Bland said, adding that he was in accord with how they were suggesting things should be done, “particularly because it comes from Christian, who I trust.”

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  Through most of the time the FBI listened in, Dawkins was trying to raise money from Blazer and his “business associates,” undercover agents, to fund his management company. To increase the amount they were willing to contribute, he stressed the status of the coaches and college programs he had compromised. If Dawkins and his cohorts were going to manage the money of pro basketball players, the major college teams were the source of the biggest piles of it. They had the greatest number of future NBA players, the potential all-stars, and the plumpest potential earnings.

  Exhibit A in his effort to demonstrate his access to these premier programs was Emanuel “Book” Richardson, the Arizona assistant coach. The Wildcats had long since supplanted UCLA as the perennial college basketball power in the West. Under former coach Lute Olson, Arizona reached the Final Four of the NCAA tournament four times between 1988 and 2002, including a national title in 1997; his successor, Sean Miller, hired in 2009, led the team into the tourney in seven of his first eight seasons and three times reached the Elite Eight. The 2017 opening-night rosters in the NBA included thirteen Arizona players, ten of them first-round draft choices—including nine who were among the first ten players selected.

  Sean Miller did not yet have the NCAA tournament résumé of Rick Pitino, but with the help of Book Richardson and his other recruiters, he had far surpassed him in his ability to produce players picked near the top of the NBA draft. “I can go to Arizona’s practices like I’m on the team,” Dawkins said in an intercepted telephone conversation. Referring to the Arizona’s coaches, he added, “We’re all friends.”

  In another phone conversation, he told Richardson he should ask for $5,000 or more a month, since he could provide such high-end talent, and “do whatever the fuck you want to do with the money.” He said he could use it to help in recruiting, “or fucking just go on vacation with it.”

  The documents describe a meeting in a hotel room in New York, attended by Dawkins, Richardson, and Sood, as well as Blazer and an undercover agent, both of whom were wearing recording devices. Richardson laid out what his approach would be in binding his players to the new management firm, explaining that he used to give players three or four options, but now realized that was not advisable because “they look like men, but they’re kids.” To put too many options in front of them, he said, was like “putting a Band-Aid over a bullet hole.”

  Before he left the meeting, Richardson accepted $5,000 in an envelope from the undercover agent, the government alleges. It was allegedly payment for his future services—his ability to deliver his players to Dawkins and his cohorts.

  Later, Dawkins followed up with a call to the undercover agent to tell him Richardson might be needing more money in order to land a coveted recruiting target, one of the top high school point guards in the nation. The head coach, he explained, wanted the kid “bad as fuck. So, I mean, the leverage I have with the program would be ridiculous at that point.” The federal case portrays Dawkins as someone who has a strategy in building his business. He assembles assets—the players and coaches—and one leads to the next. But they are not all equal. Some give him more credibility and add juice to the whole enterprise.

  At a meeting on a boat docked off Manhattan in June 2017, Dawkins touted the value of Book Richardson relative to some of the other coaches they had lured. “Lamont’s good but he’s not one of the elite, elite dudes,” he said, referring to Oklahoma State’s Lamont Evans. “I love Lamont to death but he don’t have the resources.”

  Richardson and other coaches at his level, he said, promised a much bigger return. Arizona was a recruiting dynamo, just about on par with Duke, Kentucky, and Kansas. If they kept Richardson happy, he could provide access to a steady stream of NBA lottery picks. “If you’re gonna fund those kind of guys, man, I mean, like we’d be running college basketball,” Dawkins said.

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  On a drizzly gray morning in February 2018, defense lawyers in the case trudged into a courtroom on the twenty-first floor of the Daniel Patrick Moynihan federal courthouse in lower Manhattan. The proceeding was a pretrial hearing to hear motions filed by the defense. Presiding was Judge Lewis Kaplan, a seventy-three-year-old jurist and Harvard Law School graduate who over the last quarter century had heard numerous big cases, including the only criminal prosecution in federal court of a Guantánamo detainee. Forbearance in the course of argumentation he found unworthy did not appear to be one of the judge’s strengths.

  The defendants were charged with a range of offenses, including fraud, bribery, and conspiracy. Their attorneys were likely to stipulate to most of the facts in the government’s case. They didn’t have a choice. Their clients were on tape. They were on camera in the meetings. It was hard to argue with. The defense lawyers would instead focus on legal arguments, and one in particular: A criminal charge of fraud, under federal law, must have an identifiable victim. But who were the victims in this case? Who was hurt by the schemes?

  The government identified the universities as the victims, arguing that they were defrauded because Dawkins and others caused them to unknowingly enroll players whom they knew, under NCAA rules, would be ineligible. By playing them, the universities could have their reputations sullied and suffer economic harm—including the possible revocation of TV revenue and other money paid out by the NCAA for their participation in the annual tournament. The defense, however, contended that the defendants were not defrauding the purported victims but, rather, assisting them by helping them get the players they wanted. They may have done so by unsavory methods, but who was harmed?

  The defendants were broken up into three groups to be prosecuted in three different trials, the first of which was scheduled in Judge Kaplan’s courtroom in October 2018. Due to his overlapping entanglements, Dawkins was to be a defendant in two of the trials, including the first.

  In the courtroom on this morning, the defense was trying to get the charges thrown out before trial, a routine but normally unsuccessful effort at this stage—but in this instance, one that it seemed might have a sliver of a chance. Writing in the legal blog Sidebars, Randall Eliason, a professor at the George Washington School of Law and the former chief of the Fraud and Public Corruption section at the U.S. Attorney’s office in the District of Columbia, described the government’s case as one that “definitely stretches the limits of criminal fraud.”

  Michael Schachter, the lawyer for Adidas executive Jim Gatto and a partner in the New York law firm Willkie, Farr & Gallagher, took the lead in making the case for the defendants. “At minimum,” he began, “this is an extremely unusual case.” He cited precedents that he said should lead to the charges being dismissed—one involving a sports agent named Norby Walters, as well
as certain elements of the case against Jeffrey Skilling, the former CEO of Enron. “This theory,” he said, referring to the logic of the charges against Gatto and the others, “is even more flawed.”

  Judge Kaplan, gray-haired, peered down at him from the bench through his wire-rimmed glasses. Over his right shoulder, a little daylight streamed in through a narrow window. He interrupted for the first but not last time. “Then I should just ignore everything in the indictment, right?” he asked. He did not seem to be expecting an answer.

  “I’m sorry if I’m exercised here,” Schachter apologized when he got a little animated.

  “You know, I’ve actually read the indictments,” Kaplan said when Schachter tried to characterize them. The judge paused for a beat. “Carefully,” he added.

  Schachter pressed on, violating the maxim that when you’re in a hole, stop digging. The other defense lawyers could have taken a turn and spoken up, but they seemed to be all but cowering. When Schachter tried to make an additional point, Kaplan stopped him and asked, “Are you kidding me?”

  In basketball games, there is a definitive result, a winner and a loser. But this hearing was an incremental step in a long process that would not have an outcome for months or even years—though as one defense lawyer pointed out to me, the defendants had already lost because what was on the tapes was “ruinous to their careers.” Who was going to give Book Richardson, Lamont Evans, Tony Bland, or Chuck Person another job in college basketball? Not even their own lawyers were arguing that the assistant coaches had not flagrantly violated the NCAA’s recruiting regulations. What was at issue was whether they had committed crimes.