On the first day of May, a hush fell over a Manhattan federal courtroom as wooden doors opened and lawyers and defendants entered and took their seats. Soon after the judge ordered the day’s proceedings to begin, defense attorney Steve Haney said, “Thank you, your honor, and at this time, we would call Christian Dawkins.” It was a surprising development in a trial that had been highly anticipated in college basketball circles for months. Everyone directed their gaze toward the defense counsel’s table as Dawkins, 26, slowly rose from his seat and approached the witness stand. He would make a case for his innocence to the jury; the cost of failure could mean a prison sentence. Dawkins stood trial alongside Merl Code, a former Adidas consultant. Federal prosecutors were accusing the men of conspiring to bribe assistant basketball coaches to influence players to sign with Dawkins’s management company once they turned professional. The trial was the result of a three-year FBI investigation into corruption in the sport. Last year, Dawkins was convicted in a separate trial connected to the probe on wire-fraud charges related to funneling payments to players’ families; in March, he was sentenced to six months in prison, which his attorney said he’s appealing. Last week, for the first time, he testified in his own defense. On the stand, he insisted he had no reason to bribe college coaches. Why would he? Their leverage was limited. He wanted to gain influence with players, so it was better to go directly to the source. “Everybody from a youth basketball coach, a player’s parent—that’s a father, a mother, a sister, a brother. Basically, anybody who was in charge of the kid’s recruitment process was paid,” Dawkins testified, adding later that athletes are “the only people in college that can’t get paid legally.” Before his arrest in September 2017, Dawkins was an aspiring agent who worked as a runner at ASM Sports, a firm headed by former NBA agent Andy Miller. It was Dawkins’s job, as Haney said in his opening remarks, to do the “dirty work for these agents at ASM. He did the things that the attorneys there didn’t want to do, were too old to do.” He had relationships with players and their families and provided payments for various expenses, ranging from spending cash to paying rent. Dawkins grew up in Saginaw, Michigan, the son of Lou Dawkins, a basketball coach. At 16, he took over his father’s AAU team. In 2009, he renamed the team from Saginaw Pride to Dorian’s Pride after his younger brother, Dorian Dawkins, a highly touted basketball prospect, who collapsed during a game at age 14 and was rushed to the hospital. He died that night; an autopsy revealed he had a rare heart defect. Christian Dawkins organized basketball camps and tournaments in the region, awarding plaques to players with Dorian’s name inscribed on them. Dawkins wanted to make inroads in the industry and eventually represent professional players. He started a management company called LOYD, an acronym for “Living Out Your Dreams,” which became a vehicle for his ambitions. He envisioned himself as a heavy hitter in the grassroots circuit, where access to talent is the ultimate currency; by acquiring it, he could ingratiate himself to powerful interests in the sport. In some respects, Dawkins’s testimony was not only a defense against the charges he faced but also a rebuke of NCAA amateurism, which prohibits student-athletes from receiving compensation beyond their scholarship, despite the value they provide to the multibillion-dollar college athletics industry. The prosecution depicted Dawkins as a shady operative whose actions defrauded universities by violating NCAA rules. “You can’t defraud a school,” Dawkins testified. “I don’t even know how that’s possible by players getting money. The school’s getting money. It’s ridiculous.” “At the time the players get to the college campuses, the deals are usually already done. It’s no need to pay a college coach because these players are coming into college with agents. This isn’t—this whole idea that this is an amateur world is not real.” —Christian Dawkins, testifying during his trial After court adjourned for the day, Dawkins embraced his father outside the courtroom and let out a deep sigh as he walked to a nearby elevator. As the doors opened, he turned toward a group assembled in the hallway and said, to no one in particular, “It was the best chance we’ll get.” As I watched Dawkins testify, I saw him as a cautionary tale for the consequences of sidestepping a system designed to keep NCAA basketball players from being paid for their labor. In the prosecution’s opening remarks, Assistant U.S. Attorney Eli Mark said: “This is a case about money, bribes, and basketball. It’s about the seedy underground of college sports and two insiders who are looking to cheat to get ahead.” Dawkins’s testimony did expose elements of the sport’s seedy underground, of which he admitted he was a willing participant. Prosecutors played for the jury wiretap recordings of Dawkins discussing payments for players and coaches and showed footage from hidden cameras of him introducing coaches to eager investors. But did his actions constitute a federal crime? The trial felt like an elaborate exercise in criminalizing a pawn in amateur basketball’s underground economy, a case study in who gets to have a financial stake in college athletes. Before Dawkins took the stand, Haney, his attorney, wondered why the government had brought this case before a jury at all. “I’ve never heard of a case where something like this was brought in a federal courtroom,” Haney told me one day after court. “He never thought anything he was doing were federal crimes. Nobody has because nobody in the history of this country, to my understanding, has ever been prosecuted for bribing a basketball coach.” “We have your playbook.” That was the warning from William F. Sweeney, assistant director-in-charge of the FBI’s New York office, in September 2017, as he announced the arrests of 10 people, including Dawkins, as well as assistant coaches from USC, Auburn, Arizona, and Oklahoma State, and representatives from Adidas. Joon H. Kim, then the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, described a scheme in which bribes were given to college coaches to steer players to advisers and managers, as well as payments funneled to the families of players to attend certain universities. The news sent shock waves through the sport; how many programs, coaches, and players would become embroiled in the scandal? Kim said the alleged conduct “sullied the spirit of amateur athletics, but showed contempt for the thousands of players and coaches who follow the rules and play the game the right way.” The government’s intent was clear from the outset: The arrests were meant to be a warning. The federal government was targeting those who don’t adhere to NCAA bylaws. Dawkins’s involvement in the investigation stemmed from his association with Louis Martin Blazer, a former financial adviser from Pittsburgh, who agreed to fund Dawkins’s fledgling management company if Dawkins would bring players to him as potential clients. Blazer introduced Dawkins to an investor who wanted to give money to Dawkins to bribe coaches to gain influence with players. Unbeknownst to Dawkins, Blazer was cooperating with the FBI, having pleaded guilty to securities fraud, among other charges, and the investor was an undercover FBI agent. Blazer testified for the prosecution in Dawkins’s trial. At the heart of Dawkins’s defense was his contention that he never sought to bribe coaches; it was Blazer and the undercover agent who pursued the idea. His intent was to get money in the hands of players and their families. He thought bribing coaches was counterproductive to his business interests. “At the time the players get to the college campuses, the deals are usually already done,” Dawkins testified. “It’s no need to pay a college coach because these players are coming into college with agents. This isn’t—this whole idea that this is an amateur world is not real.” “The second somebody tries to come around and try to find a way to provide for the actual student themselves … they get vilified. They get criminalized and prosecuted.<doc-sep>Christian Dawkins was found guilty of two of six charges he was facing in federal court during the second college basketball corruption case on Wednesday afternoon. But perhaps the most interesting thing that happened involving Dawkins was his comments to reporters following the jury’s verdict. Dawkins was charged with conspiracy to commit bribery and bribery as the two-week college basketball corruption trial concluded in New York on Wednesday. Afterwards, reporter Adam Zagoria asked Dawkins how he would have answered a question on the witness stand about Arizona head coach Sean Miller knowing that Arizona players were being paid. Government lawyers objected before Dawkins could answer in both instances as Dawkins was never given the chance to answer under oath. Zagoria’s question follows up a previous ESPN report from Mark Schlabach in February 2018 in which Dawkins allegedly had a phone call with Miller centering around an alleged payment to star center Deandre Ayton. Downplaying the alleged phone call, and Miller’s alleged payment to Ayton, Dawkins gave some surprisingly candid on-the-record quotes for a man who was just convicted of a federal crime. “I wasn’t there. I just got out of criminal court case for the last two months. I had no involvement with Deandre Ayton, that’s a fact,” Dawkins continued. “So the whole (February 2018) ESPN report (that said Dawkins and Miller discussed paying Ayton), that’s something I couldn’t say is accurate because I never had conversations about delivering Deandre Ayton to Arizona for Sean Miller. Didn’t happen.” Dawkins also reiterated to Zagoria that it was Arizona assistant coach Book Richardson who brought up Ayton’s name during the trial. “Book is saying, ‘Sean [Miller] gave Ayton X,Y,Z.’ I’m just listening,” Dawkins said. Schlabach’s initial ESPN report said that FBI wiretaps intercepted telephone conversations between Miller and Dawkins in which Miller discussed paying $100,000 to make sure Ayton signed with Arizona. Dawkins’ comments on Wednesday contradict Schlabach’s initial report while none of the alleged phone calls between Dawkins and Miller have been included as evidence during the college basketball corruption trials.<doc-sep>“He could have brought the whole world of college basketball to his knees — he chose not to,” Haney said. “He had every opportunity in the world to do so, to cooperate and testify against a number of people for his own personal relief, and he chose not to and fight it. And I think his fight was a good fight, and I think in many ways he won that fight.” Asked if the government should go after figures larger than runners like Dawkins and Code, Haney said, “If they’re going to, then go after the right people, or make a change and provide these kids with the resources so their families can at least travel to see them play, so the kids are able to live above the poverty level because that’s really the level we’re talking about with these kids on these campuses. “And they’re making these schools, these coaches, these athletic directors hundreds of millions of dollars and they’re not getting anything for that. And something needs to change. So hopefully this case will create that dialogue. And I think that jury spoke loudly today when they said those schools were not deprived of their honest services of those coaches who are engaged in providing those players with resources.” Sentencing will occur at a later date.<doc-sep>
The chief executive of a fledgling sports management company and a former Adidas employee were convicted Wednesday of bribing coaches to steer players to the firm, the final active case in the long-running federal probe into college basketball corruption. The jury in U.S. District Court in New York found Christian Dawkins guilty of bribery and conspiracy to commit bribery from efforts — some recorded by cameras, wiretaps or undercover FBI agents posing as investors — to lure clients to the company he founded. Merl Code, a longtime Nike employee before joining Adidas, was convicted on a single count of conspiracy to commit bribery. The investigation became public with a series of high-profile arrests by the FBI in September 2017 and, for a time, seemed destined to upend college basketball. In the end, however, the probe ensnared only Dawkins, an ambitious middleman who isn’t well known outside of the sport, four assistant coaches and a handful of others. “And while their convictions mark the culmination of the criminal charges announced by this Office in September 2017,” U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman said in a statement, “they should also make clear to those who might be tempted to engage in the sort of misconduct these prosecutions have only begun to expose: that bribery is a crime, one this Office is prepared to charge criminally and prosecute to the full extent of the law.” Sign up for our daily sports newsletter » The jury acquitted Dawkins and Code on a combined seven counts centered on allegations the men defrauded Arizona, USC and several others schools. “Not guilty on four of six counts offers us some degree of satisfaction,” Steve Haney, the Michigan-based attorney for Dawkins, told the Los Angeles Times. “The only real victims in any of this continue to be the student-athletes making schools hundreds of millions of dollars … and receiving no monetary consideration for their labor.” Three former assistant coaches charged in the case — Arizona’s Book Richardson, Oklahoma State’s Lamont Evans and USC’s Tony Bland — pleaded guilty this year as part of deals with prosecutors. They’ll be sentenced later this spring. Code, Dawkins and Jim Gatto, another Adidas employee, were sentenced to prison in March after being convicted last year of conspiracy to commit wire fraud in connection with paying families of players at Kansas, Louisville and North Carolina State. All received sentences much shorter than what prosecutors recommended, something seen by defense attorneys as undercutting government claims about the seriousness of what occurred. A third trial linked to the investigation had been scheduled for June, but former Auburn assistant coach Chuck Person accepted a plea bargain and, earlier this week, clothier Rashan Michel did the same. The financial advisor linked to the scheme, Munish Sood, and an amateur basketball coach, T.J. Gassnola, previously pleaded guilty and cooperated with prosecutors. The two-week trial of Dawkins and Code did little to pull bigger names into the investigation. Efforts by Haney to compel Arizona head coach Sean Miller and Louisiana State head coach Will Wade to testify weren’t successful. Perhaps the most dramatic moment involved the playing of a wiretapped phone call between Dawkins and Richardson where the former Arizona assistant alleged Miller was paying star Deandre Ayton $10,000 a month. No evidence directly linking Miller to the purported payments was presented. After several days of testimony about discreet meetings with coaches and bribe money provided by undercover FBI agents, Dawkins took the stand in his own defense. He said the idea to pay college coaches to direct their players to use the sports management company came from one of the undercover FBI agents posing as an investor. “The players are being paid and also are involved with people who have the influence over them well before they get to college,” Dawkins testified. “So to pay someone who they are going to be with on campus for six months, who’s probably also paid somebody else to get them, it wouldn’t even make common sense to pay a college basketball coach. They don’t have the influence needed to deliver the player to you.” The case exposed emails, text messages and recorded meetings detailing plans to pay elite players or their handlers. During a discussion with attorneys last week, Judge Edgardo Ramos steered questioning away from reasons college players or their associates might be paid. The NCAA regulation against such payments was at the heart of the government’s legal argument.