Coaches at Auburn, Oklahoma State, Arizona and Southern California were all accused of accepting bribes in exchange for offering to steer players to preferred financial advisers, business managers and agents. A top Adidas executive and two associates were accused of arranging illicit payments for high school stars and their families to secure athlete commitments to Adidas-sponsored schools. And two other unnamed universities whose descriptions in the documents match Louisville and Miami were implicated in planning to give top basketball recruits with illicit payments outlined in three complaints unsealed Tuesday.
The picture painted by the charges brought today is not a pretty one, Joon Kim, acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a midday news conference. Coaches at some of the nations top programs soliciting and accepting cash bribes. Managers and financial advisers circling blue-chip prospects like coyotes. And employees of one the worlds largest sportswear companies
secretly funneling cash to the families of high school recruits.
The assistant coaches named in the complaints are Lamont Evans of Oklahoma State, Chuck Person of Auburn, Emanuel Richardson of Arizona and Tony Bland of USC. The coaches are charged with accepting bribes in exchange for steering athletes toward using the services of business executives including Jim Gatto, the head of sports marketing at Adidas, and Munish Sood, chief executive of financial advisory company Princeton Capital.
The complaint alleges that Gatto paid recruits to sign with Adidas-sponsored schools and then sign with Adidas once they turned professional. He was assisted in this scheme by Merl Code, another Adidas employee, according to the complaint. The payments were brokered by three men: Sood; Christian Dawkins, a business manager; and Jonathan Brad Augustine, who runs an Adidas-sponsored AAU basketball team. The payments were made with the promise that the players sign agreements with Dawkins and Sood once they turned professional.
The men agreed to pay $100,000 to the family of one recruit and $150,000 to the family of another recruit, the complaint alleges. The schools were not named, though one was described as a public research university located in Kentucky with approximately 22,640 students, which is the approximate student population of the University of Louisville. In August, the school announced that it had agreed to extend its apparel agreement with Adidas through 2028. The other school was described as a private research university located in Florida with approximately 16,000 students. This would seem to match up with the University of Miami, another Adidas-sponsored school.
The alleged conspirators are accused in the complaint of paying one recruit, described as an all-American, $100,000 to attend the university in Kentucky, with the payments designed to be concealed from both the school and the NCAA. The scheme was set in motion in May, after the player announced that he was looking at other schools. In June, after the alleged bribery scheme kicked in, the player announced his intention to attend the school in Kentucky, a decision that was regarded as a surprise. The payments were made at the request of at least one coach on that schools staff, according to the charging documents. Via tapped cellphone conversations heard by the FBI, the defendants also are accused of money laundering in an attempt to cover up the source of the payments.
