NCAA hoops rocked by kickback scandal
• Four assistant basketball coaches at Division I schools and a top Adidas executive were among 10 people charged Tuesday with crimes including bribery and fraud as part of a wide-ranging federal investigation into corruption in college basketball.
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 Adidassponsored schools. And two other unnamed universities — whose descriptions in indictments match Louisville and Miami — were implicated as landing top basketball recruits thanks to the illicit payments outlined in indictments 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 Tuesday. “Coaches at some of the nation’s top programs soliciting and accepting cash bribes. Managers and financial advisers circling blue- chip prospects like coyotes. And employees of one the world’s largest sportswear companies ... secretly funnelling cash to the families of high school recruits.”
The assistant coaches named in the indictments are Lamont Evans of Oklahoma State, former NBA star 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 t he 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 Gatto paid recruits to sign with Adidas- s ponsored 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.