The Last Temptation of Rick Pitino

by Michael Sokolove

  When the cases finally come to trial, juries might be more open to some of the legal arguments than Kaplan was. Prosecutors must make a case according to the existing legal statutes, but to get conviction, they must also tell a story that juries find compelling, and that may be difficult here. In the narrative laid out by government lawyers, there were victims—but they were not necessarily the universities. On moral and ethical grounds (if not, perhaps, legal ones), it is the young athletes who look more like victims. Adults were making money off them. In some cases, their own family members were profiting from them. It’s not clear how many of the kids received any money, or how much.

  Judge Kaplan seemed to indicate that he was eager to put college basketball itself on trial in his courtroom. As Schachter tried to make another point, he stopped him and said, “We all know as a matter of common sense how this industry works. We do, don’t we?”

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  Dawkins was in court that February morning and beautifully put together, as usual—a bespoke khaki-colored suit with a white pocket square over an off-white shirt, though he was a little out of season, as if he were attending a July charity event in the Hamptons.

  He is about six feet tall with an athletic-enough-looking build, but he said that suits off the rack do not fit his frame. His light brown shoes came from a boutique in New York. He did not remember exactly where he purchased them, but he did know when—on the day of the NBA draft in 2017, which took place at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. He somehow made the trip without packing proper footwear.

  An aunt of Dawkins’s had traveled in from Los Angeles to support him at his court appearance. “His parents are both educators,” she said, explaining why they could not be there.

  Because he is a part of two of the trials, Dawkins had two hearings to attend. As the lawyers, defendants, and a handful of journalists congregated in the corridors before and after the proceedings, he seemed relaxed and at times even to be enjoying having a small audience. His lawyer, Haney, a longtime family friend from Michigan, was talking during one break about Lou Dawkins’s playing career. “Your dad hit the most famous shot in Tulsa history,” he said. “He was a damn good player.”

  “He was serviceable,” Dawkins joked in response, adding that over the years the myth of his father’s buzzer-beating shot had grown. “It was a normal three-pointer. Now it’s like it was from half-court.”

  Dawkins said that he hoped one day to get back in the basketball business, if not as an agent then perhaps as a consultant of some kind. But he was shut down for now. “No GM is going to talk to me,” he said, “but I still talk to my players. They’re still cool with me. But when [the FBI] took my phones, I lost a lot of my contacts, so there’s some guys I’m just out of touch with.”

  Like the other defendants and their lawyers, he was whipsawed by Judge Kaplan’s unyielding tone, but he did see a bright side in it. “I thought it was going to be boring, and it definitely wasn’t boring.”

  Kaplan had commented from the bench that the assistant coaches among the defendants seemed to have “selfish” motives and were not “acting in the sole interests of the schools.” At the same time they were recruiting players, he said, they were acting to advance their own financial well-being and careers. That, in particular, seemed off base to Dawkins. “Isn’t that the way the world works?” he said. “Even if you work for somebody you still have to look out for yourself, too, right?”

  He said that he had to get permission from the court to travel but had been able to spend some time in Atlanta. Mostly he was living with his parents in Cleveland because that’s what his mother wanted. “The way she feels is, when I was out on my own, I got arrested.”

  Dawkins is affable and funny, and you can see why he was, in his own way, successful. He joked about being under his parents’ watch in a city he’d rather not be in. “If I get convicted and have to go to jail,” he said, “don’t you think I should get some credit for time served for living in Cleveland?”

  CHAPTER NINE

  WHEN WE SIN AGAINST OUR NATURE

  In the documents filed by prosecutors, individuals not charged with crimes but who figured into the schemes in some way were identified indirectly. Brian Bowen Jr. was “Player-10,” but almost immediately after news of the federal investigation broke, media outlets identified him by name. He was, after all, the only player who had committed late in the recruiting season to a “public research university located in Kentucky” with “approximately 22,640 students.” (It made you wonder why the prosecutors bothered with the aliases.) Brian Bowen Sr. was called “Father-2,” and Pitino, “Coach-2.”

  Prosecutors quoted media accounts of Bowen’s June 3, 2017, announcement that he had chosen Louisville and noted that his decision was considered a “surprise commitment”—that it “came out of nowhere” and was a “late recruiting coup.” The government alleged that beginning in May 2017, Dawkins and his associates conspired to funnel $100,000 to Bowen’s family in order to influence him to enroll at Louisville. The plan was formulated at the “request and with the assistance of one or more coaches” at Louisville, and the money was to come from Adidas and to be delivered to Brian Bowen Sr., the player’s father, in four payments of $25,000 each.

  The motivation for such a scheme would go back to the principles established by Sonny Vaccaro, who wanted the programs that his shoe company sponsored to land top players, get on national TV, and advance deep into the NCAA tournament. And it would be in line with the desires of Tom Jurich (even though no one suggests he knew about payoffs), who wanted top players and winning teams to fill the arena and please the deep-pocketed Louisvillians who paid for his luxury boxes and premium seats.

  Dawkins and his cohorts knew all that. They understood the industry from top to bottom. They may have been unknown to some of their patrons, but they were fulfilling needs, working behind the scenes, greasing the levers and making everyone happy. They did not always do their work seamlessly—they had serious cash flow problems—or as secretly as they imagined, but they had a handle on all the motivations.

  In the transcripts taken from the FBI recordings, Merl Code, like Dawkins, serves as an instructor to those he believes are not as well versed in how college recruiting really works—and as an unwitting narrator for prosecutors. He tells Sood, the Princeton-based Indian American financial advisor and a novice in this game, that he is being introduced to “how stuff happens with kids and getting into particular schools, and so this is kind of one of those instances where we needed to step up and help one of our flagship schools in Louisville, you know, secure a five-star-caliber kid. Obviously, that helps, you know, our potential business.”

  Code, who worked for Nike before joining Adidas, continues in that same conversation to instruct Sood on the dark art of how to get cash to high school players, stressing that it has to be a chain—with no direct link between the shoe company and the recipient of the money. Adidas, he says, could not be seen as “engaging in a monetary relationship with an amateur athlete. We’re engaging in a monetary relationship with a business manager, and whatever he decides to do with it, that’s between him and the family.” (Munish Sood was one of the ten individuals arrested in the investigation—but one of two who has not been indicted by the Justice Department. He is not a defendant in any of the three scheduled trials and is assumed to be cooperating with prosecutors.)

  In their interactions with one another, the defendants give a strong impression of being the types who make promises before they fully think things through and before they tidy up what would seem like crucial details. For example: where the money will come from and how it will be accounted for without raising suspicions. There is a caper element to their day-to-day machinations. On film, the great college basketball scandal of 2017 and 2018 would play as tragicomedy.

  Two months after prosecutors say that Brian Bowen Sr. agreed to a deal, and after his son wa
s already on Louisville’s campus, he still had not received any of the $100,000 he was promised. It was slow coming from Adidas, so Dawkins and Code persuaded Sood and a person they believed was an associate of Sood’s (he was an FBI undercover agent) to front them $25,000, to be reimbursed by Adidas. Code later tells Dawkins the reimbursement seems hung up in the system—and expresses frustration about an email request for “all these PO numbers and vendor numbers and blah blah blah blah blah.”

  It was the type of bureaucratic nightmare that anyone who works in a corporate setting would recognize. Code’s requests for payment kept being spit back to him. He had wanted to route the money through a consulting company he controlled, but the gambit was stymied because Code’s firm was not yet in the company’s system. Understandably, he hoped to elevate the issue to someone who could just cut through the red tape. He complained to Dawkins that he wished Gatto would just “flex his muscle and push it through the system, but that’s obviously not what’s happening.”

  Any reporter who has ever covered a mob trial or a criminal case made with secret recordings knows that there are always moments of dark comedy captured on the tapes—some poor schlub, caught on a wiretap or hidden microphone, who says something along the lines of, “I really hope we’re not being recorded.” In the light of day, such statements are not generally helpful to criminal defendants. On the wiretaps, the defendants in the basketball case do indeed give some worry to covering their tracks. Code says he might have to “lean on” an unidentified Adidas executive, someone senior to Gatto, and get him to execute “some of his side hustle off-the-books shit” to finance the reimbursement. He makes it clear that for reasons of “cleanliness and lack of questions,” the money transfer to Bowen Sr. had to be in cash. Dawkins says, “Obviously, we have to put funding out, and obviously some of it can’t be completely accounted for on paper because some of it is, whatever you want to call it, illegal.” On July 11, the FBI undercover agent, Sood’s supposed partner, showed up at Sood’s Princeton office with $25,000 in cash. They seemed to have grown impatient waiting for Adidas to come up with the money. Two days later, Sood passed on $19,500 of it to Brian Bowen Sr. at a restaurant near Newark International Airport in what the government termed a “handoff.” It was the first of what was supposed to be four installments.

  Dawkins also seems to have promised additional money—again, without knowing what its source would be. He told an undercover agent in a phone conversation that although the deal for Brian Bowen Jr. was done, “basically, we just need to take care of his dad with two grand monthly. . . . I just gotta figure out how to get the two grand to him every month.”

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  The last week of July 2017 was the apex of the summer grassroots basketball season—and a moment when the government collected some of its most damaging information regarding Louisville. Three massive tournaments—the Adidas Fab 48, the Super 64, and the Bigfoot Las Vegas Classic—were all in progress at the same time. Hundreds of teams and thousands of players descended on the desert from just about every state in the nation, as well as from Europe, South America, New Zealand, Australia, and Africa. The temperature hit 107 degrees that week, but the games, like everything else in Las Vegas in the summer, took place in well-chilled indoor spaces. The players ranged in age from high schoolers all the way down to third graders, and the games attracted head coaches and their assistants from just about every Division I basketball program in the NCAA.

  Christian Dawkins set up shop in a hotel on the Strip. On July 27, prosecutors say, he met with Marty Blazer; Jonathan Brad Augustine, who was the director of an AAU program in Florida that produced a steady stream of college players; and the undercover agent posing as Blazer’s associate. The government notes, “Prior to the meeting, the FBI placed video recorders inside of the hotel room.”

  The fifth person in the meeting was Jordan Fair, then twenty-six years old, an assistant coach at Louisville who was previously the head coach at Oldsmar Christian School in Florida, his alma mater, before Pitino hired him in 2016. Fair attended three different colleges, graduating from St. Petersburg College in Florida. At the University of North Florida, where he played basketball his freshman year, his bio in the media guide said that the “person he would most like to meet” was Michael Jordan and his ambition was to play basketball overseas and eventually become a college coach.

  Oldsmar Christian, near Tampa, was a mecca for top players and a good place for a coach hoping to advance in his profession. In just four years, Fair won 115 games against just 32 losses, and seventeen of his kids earned Division I scholarships. It was unusual for Pitino to pluck someone right from high school coaching and put him on his staff, but as he explained after hiring Fair, “I first came across Jordan while recruiting some of his players. I was extremely impressed with his practices, his organizational skills, and the way he related to his players.”

  Fair had intended to make an impression. He said that whenever college coaches came into his gym, he regarded it as an audition. Pitino gave him a job as a “program assistant” and the next season promoted him to become one of his three assistant coaches. “I take every practice and every workout in front of college coaches as a job interview,” he told the Louisville Courier-Journal after first joining Pitino’s staff. “He just brought up a couple of positions that he had and asked if I’d be interested. God has blessed me; there’s no better place to get into this thing than with someone like Coach Pitino.”

  Not long after Fair got his promotion, replacing a Pitino assistant, Mike Balado, who left to become head coach at Arkansas State, Pitino said that Fair was already proving himself as a formidable recruiter. “We’ve had assistants move on and sometimes you’re happy for them, but that hurts continuity,” he said. “And that’s where the so-called operations guys or graduation assistants come in, a guy like Jordan Fair, for instance. Mike Balado leaves, and he had a lot to do with our future recruiting, but Jordan Fair comes in and he’s a big-time recruiter and he fills that void right away.”

  Prosecutors described what occurred during the July 27 meeting in Vegas. With Fair in the room, Dawkins began talking about a player in the high school class of 2019—the class after Brian Bowen Jr.—whom he was trying to direct to Louisville. According to the criminal complaint, Dawkins “laid out the plan to funnel money to the family of the player, and said, ‘The mom is like . . . we need our fucking money. So we got to be able to fund the situation. . . . We’re all working together to get the kid to Louisville. Obviously, in turn, the kid will come back to us.’”

  Dawkins noted that because Louisville was already on NCAA probation, they had to be careful. At this point, the complaint says, Fair agreed, adding, “We gotta be very low key.” Dawkins then said that the plan “works on every angle. We have Merl at Adidas, we have Brad out with the kid, and we have Louisville.” The reference to Louisville, the document says, was made as Dawkins nodded in the direction of Fair.

  Augustine suggested that the easiest way to get payments to this player would be to direct the money through his AAU program. The undercover agent handed Augustine an envelope with $12,700 in cash, the complaint says. After that, Augustine said that he expected Adidas to contribute a significant amount for the player because they would want to help Pitino and Louisville. “No one swings a bigger dick than Pitino” at Adidas, Augustine said, according to the criminal complaint. He added that all Pitino had to do was “pick up the phone and call somebody [and say] these are my guys, [and] they’re taking care of us.”

  After Jordan Fair left the room, the discussion turned back to the subject of Brian Bowen Jr. Dawkins recalled that the money they had first agreed to pay his family had needed to be increased, because after they settled on a number, a rival athletic company “was coming in with a higher number.” According to Dawkins, he reached out to Pitino directly at that point and informed him, “I need you to call Jim Gatto,” in order to secure more
money and make sure that the deal to get Bowen to Louisville would be consummated.

  On May 27, according to the FBI, Gatto had two phone conversations “with a phone number used by Pitino.” On June 1, he had a third conversation with someone at the same number. Two days later, Brian Bowen Jr. announced he was going to Louisville.

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  Augustine was among the ten people arrested—and is one of the two, along with Sood, who has not been indicted and is not a defendant in any of the trials. It appears that he never passed on the cash that was intended as payments to players or their families, and therefore could not be prosecuted for bribery.

  In a court hearing, Gatto’s lawyer, Michael Schachter, pointed out that avarice seemed to have prevented at least one of the bribery schemes from reaching completion. “Mr. Augustine had no intention of taking any money and handing it to” the father of a Florida high school player, its purported purpose. “Effectively, he was in his own scheme to rip off Mr. Gatto.”

  In the narrative laid out by the government, it is possible at various times to conclude that some of the defendants seemed to be trying to pocket money that had another intended purpose—a not uncommon occurrence among people who are charged with illicit activity. Defendants, however, are rarely acquitted just because they are not honest with one another.

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  After the arrests were made, the charges filed, and the news blasted that the FBI and the Justice Department had moved against college basketball, Brian Bowen Jr. was summoned to New York to be interviewed by federal law enforcement agents. He was a month into the fall semester at Louisville and had been participating in workouts and playing in pickup games with his future teammates in advance of the start of full-squad practices, which were less than a week away.