The Justice Department has charged assistant coaches from four prominent college basketball programs in what it describes as a wide-ranging system of bribery and fraud related to financial advisors.
Assistant coaches Chuck Person (Auburn), Lamont Evans (Oklahoma State), Emanuel "Book" Richardson (Arizona) and Tony Bland (USC) have been arrested along with Jim Gatto, the director of sports marketing at Adidas, and five others, the Justice Department and FBI announced Tuesday morning.
According to complaints filed with the U.S. Circuit Court for the Southern District of New York, the FBI and U.S. Attorney's Office have been investigating the "criminal influence of money" on NCAA basketball athletes and coaches since 2015. The probe revealed "numerous instances" of financial advisors, business managers and others paying bribes to assistant college basketball coaches — and sometimes directly to players — in exchange for the coaches encouraging those athletes to use the services of the financial managers once they turned pro.
The complaint against Person, a former Auburn star who played 13 years in the NBA, says he accepted approximately $91,500 in bribes over a 10-month period from a "cooperating witness" who ran a financial services firm and was facing federal fraud charges. Person faces counts of bribery conspiracy, solitication of bribes, conspiracy to commit fraud and wire fraud.
The same cooperating witness and financial adviser Munish Sood, who is also facing charges, met with Evans multiple times in 2016 and 2017 when Evans was an assistant at South Carolina and then Oklahoma State. The complaint says Evans was paid at least $22,000 in bribes over the course of a year to steer players to Sood's firm, Princeton Advisory Group.
