[dramatic music]
Downloaded from YTS.MX
♪ ♪
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
announcer: The following is a presentation
of HBO Sports.
[unsettling music]
♪ ♪
- [sniffs]
Good afternoon.
♪ ♪
Let me be very, very clear.
I have never discussed with Christian Dawkins
paying Deandre Ayton to attend the University of Arizona.
In fact, I never even met or spoke to Christian Dawkins
until after Deandre publicly announced
that he was coming to our school.
Any reporting to the contrary is inaccurate,
false, and defamatory.
- I'm very proud of everything I've done
as LSU's head coach,
and I'm very proud of what we've done at LSU.
And I--or we have never, ever, um...
done business of any kind with, uh--with Christian Dawkins.
♪ ♪
- I have never been interviewed
about this subject.
- At this point, yes.
I am a convicted felon.
It is very weird for me to say that I'm a convicted felon,
especially over basketball.
- I don't even wanna tell my story
as much as I wanna tell the bigger story,
in my opinion.
It's a ridiculous story.
Everyone went into it with the right intention.
Did it get completely fucked up?
I mean, it got fucked up to...
I mean, I... [scoffs]
Beyond my imagination,
and I have a pretty big imagination.
- Did I do anything wrong?
Um...
[dynamic music]
♪ ♪
- A shot fired across the bough
of college basketball.
- Ten men, including four assistant coaches
at top-tier programs,
arrested on corruption charges.
- This is absolutely gonna change the very landscape
of college basketball.
- Christian Dawkins is a sketchy character,
wannabe agent.
Nobody trusts anybody right now.
- Mm-hmm.
- 'Cause nobody knows where this is going.
- I mean, basketball, up to this point,
has been my whole life.
I've been around it probably--
like, really knowing what it was,
probably since five years old.
And as far as I can remember,
basketball's always pretty much been
one of the most important things in my life.
- I've known Christian Dawkins probably about 15 years.
First met him
when he was around probably 10 or 11 years old.
He was part of a legacy family in Michigan,
the Dawkins family,
and the Dawkins' name has always been synonymous
in Michigan with basketball.
- We always pretty much been a basketball family.
My dad was a high school basketball coach
where I grew up at.
[intriguing music]
- Born and raised in Saginaw, Michigan...
Uh, the number one city in the United States
for high school basketball.
- [chuckling] Please.
- Began coaching in '96
at the number one high school in the country,
Saginaw High School.
- He led the Saginaw High Trojans
to back-to-back championships.
And from that point on,
I think his place in Michigan high school basketball history
was pretty well-established.
- He played a pretty big role in the community.
I would think that most people would know me via him,
or because of--
our whole family, people would know
because of his reputation in the community.
- One thing I didn't do-- and she can quote me on this--
I didn't push my sons or my daughter
to play basketball.
I gave them the opportunity to decide...
- [chuckles]
- Which sport-- which sport to choose.
It just so happened that, you know,
I was pretty good coming up in Saginaw, playing, myself.
So I had a little bit of legendary status
behind my name as well.
So my sons and my daughter said--
they had to prove to me that they were better than me,
better than their dad.
And so they took the initiative and played basketball.
Is that correct?
- I don't know that that's all true...
- [laughs] - But I'll--I'll go with it.
[stirring music]
♪ ♪
- This was the gym that
I spent most of my young adult life at.
We spent the summers, every day here,
after school, every day.
♪ ♪
Yeah, when I was growing up, I wanted to be, like,
a NBA All-Star.
I think everyone has those dreams.
7th, 8th, and 9th grade, I think I'm the shit.
I think I'm good, okay?
- Christian was good, but Christian was stubborn.
I would give him things to do
out there on the basketball court,
and he would take it upon himself
to change the routine.
- I didn't make varsity my freshmen year; I made JV.
'Cause even though he was my dad,
he still didn't play me.
Like, it wasn't, like, a nepotism situation at all.
JV, I was one of the best players on the team.
I still think I'm the shit.
In my head, I'm going to the NBA.
First-round pick.
Varsity practice, the first year, sophomore year,
we had Draymond Green,
and we had probably-- I don't know--
a couple more of the Division I players.
That first practice is when I realized
I should probably start, you know,
looking into other avenues.
- My child has always been different.
[soft dramatic music]
- Chris is very intelligent.
When we would go on recruiting tournaments, trips,
instead of him reading just sports magazines,
he's reading business magazines, you know,
which I thought was kind of odd.
- I was young. I was probably ten.
I started to be more intrigued or curious
about what was going on outside of just a basketball game
and what was going on around the sport.
I think the pivotal moment was when I was in--
I don't know--5th, 6th grade.
I read the book "Sole Influence."
I remember being in class, reading the book.
- Late 1990s, I was covering the growing world of AAU
and basketball and talent camps.
Nike and Adidas were having what they called
the "shoe war" over these players,
and it was kind of a new-- that was a new concept
at the time of what was going on.
There was clearly this world of sports
that had incredible influence over how basketball,
both college and pro, were being played.
- "Sole Influence" is the best book
and most accurate book I've ever read
as far as on the money about the shit that goes on
in grassroots basketball and in college recruiting.
It was real.
My mind was shaped to a certain way
to understand that early.
Like, "Okay, this is how this works."
People come into Saginaw, they coming to get something.
It's the talent.
And the people that was coming to get them
was usually rich white people--
white coaches, white agents,
white, you know, business managers,
white sneaker reps--
whatever the case may be.
Yeah, I'm not knocking nobody,
but I just understood the value
of the African American athlete,
and that's why books like "Sole Influence"
resonated so much with me.
When I read that book, I'm like,
"This is what I wanna do."
- Christian's always had this business mind.
When he was 11, I remember,
we were sitting on the porch,
and I kept getting mail.
And it would be addressed to Christian,
but when I would open it-- 'cause I'm thinking,
"Who is he getting--" and it would---
it was random people.
Open it up, and then I would find checks.
So we called Christian in, and we're talking to him.
He goes, "Oh, yeah.
That's for my company."
I'm like, "What co--what company, buddy?"
[melancholy music]
- So "Best of the Best Scouting"
was the name of the publication I started,
and it was a scouting service for the top players
in the state of Michigan
and also had some coverage in the Midwest.
I knew everybody in Michigan basketball
'cause of my dad.
Everybody who was anybody came through that gym.
I would go and, you know, try to make my notes
and scout as much as I thought I could at that point.
- It was very detailed,
almost in a frightening manner,
on who the top middle school players were
in the state of Michigan.
People were signing up,
and nobody knew who this guy was
that was rating and ranking these players.
- I think I charged coaches around 600 bucks.
College coaches.
- Division I basketball coaches
were paying $600 for this website
this 12-year-old made in his basement.
[chuckles]
The funniest thing was, he ranked himself.
- I did rank myself.
I mean, it was times I ranked myself one.
That was bad.
- And he actually had listed himself as 6'2"
when he was, like, 14 or 15.
He's, like, 5'10" now.
- I probably shouldn't have done that. [chuckles]
- You know, a lot of the triggers for Christian
was growing up realizing
how important basketball was in his household.
And, you know,
you win back-to-back state championships,
you have a little brother that is, you know,
revered as being one of the next great players.
- Dorian still, to this day, is the best friend I've had.
I was 2 years, 2 1/2 years older than him.
He was the best player on our varsity team in middle school.
He didn't play with us, but when he practiced,
he was the best player.
He got invited to every elite camp you can get invited to.
He was getting letters from UCLA
and stuff in middle school.
So he was already in the mix.
- So we went to Toledo.
It was--I think it was called
the Toledo Michigan-Ohio Border Battle.
And DD was 14.
And we were playing against All Ohio Red
and I think All Ohio Red at the time
had won the last three AAU national titles.
I think Dorian had, like,
40 points and 12 assists.
Probably 9 or 10 rebounds.
I'm like, "Wow, this boy's gonna be special."
So they ended up beating All Ohio Red.
And All Ohio Red coach came up to me after the game,
and he was like, "Coach, I saw you over there,
cheering on the side," you know.
"What college is that young kid going to?"
- [laughs softly]
- And I said, "Man, that boy is about to be
a ninth grader in high school."
He's like, "You gotta be kidding me."
And I was like, "No, listen, man.
He just turned 14. That's my son."
And about a month later,
we had a tournament.
I saw the same AAU coach on the--on the elevator.
He was like, "Hey, Coach. How your son doing?"
I said, "Man, you won't believe."
I said, "Man, he died a couple weeks ago."
And, uh...
[somber music]
♪ ♪
[inhales, exhales]
- He died at a camp, playing basketball.
He was playing with us.
I was going to my senior year.
He was going to his freshman year.
He was by far our best player.
My dad wasn't coaching that game
because he was in a wedding.
So just his assistant was with us,
and none--neither one of my parents were with us.
It was a regular day.
He played well, and then, um...
he got fouled going to the rim.
He's at the free-throw line.
He looks at me, he goes, "Brother, I'm so tired."
I'm just thinking it's like, "Okay," like, you know--
you know, no big deal,
and he collapsed.
I'm thinking he had-- he's having a seizure.
And then, um...
He, um...
They were, like, operating on him
in the--in the hospital room,
and, um,
at that point, he had had a heart attack already.
They were trying to, like, revive him
to the point where he could function again.
And once they, you know, induced him,
he just never woke back up.
♪ ♪
- He had a heart condition. [sniffles]
[solemn music]
And...
[sniffles, breathes shakily]
No one--no one knew.
♪ ♪
- He had a rare heart disease
where, like, his artery essentially
wasn't strong enough
to maintain the blood flow in his heart.
He essentially had a over--oversized heart.
[melancholy music]
♪ ♪
There is not a day that goes by that I don't, like--
I don't think about him in some way.
♪ ♪
Dorian was a better athlete.
I mean, he was--he was--
he was the one.
He was gonna be the next star from Saginaw,
had he--had he lived.
♪ ♪
Listen, man.
Faith is a funny thing, right?
Like...
Part of the whole idea is,
"Believe in what you don't really know."
Because there's no answer that anyone could give me
that would make me be like, "Okay, I'm cool with it."
So I had to just understand that I didn't understand...
And try to make a positive out of a negative.
[soft solemn music]
So when my brother passed away,
I wanted to do something in his memory.
I planned a high school basketball tournament...
In conjunction with the American Heart Association
to try to raise money for heart disease.
And then the rest of the money,
we used to fund the travel team that we had,
which was originally called Team Pride,
and when Dorian passed away, we switched to become--
the name to become Dorian's Pride.
My role for-- with Dorian's Pride,
I was essentially the general manager,
so to speak.
I was probably 16.
I essentially gained the sponsorship deals,
raised the money,
picked all the coaches or other administrators,
picked the tournaments we played in,
recruited most of the players.
If there was a top-level player,
I pretty much recruited them to the program.
- Christian, he had an eye for talent,
but more importantly, he would work.
Christian would just make sure he went to all the games.
He would go to the practices.
He would find a way to connect with family members.
And he was beating out
a lot of the top Nike and Adidas guys
for some of the top talent in Michigan.
- And he took a...
a very good team and turned them into
one of the top five AAU programs in the country.
- At the age of, like, 17,
he got Under Armour to sponsor the team,
and it was the only Under Armour-sponsored team,
at that time, in the Midwest.
To this day, nobody understands or knows
how he was able to secure an Under Armour shoe deal.
- It's marketing.
If you're Nike and you're trying to launch a new shoe
and you need it to get some level of visibility on it
or some level of recognition for it,
what's the best way to get that shoe out
or get that shoe some exposure in Saginaw, Michigan?
You put it on the high school team,
the high school players.
How else would Saginaw, Michigan know about
a Nike--a new Nike shoe?
If I'm outfitting Zion Williamson
in South Carolina with all Adidas or all Nike,
pretty sure kids in that area are gonna buy
Nikes and Adidas because he's gonna be the most popular,
most visible person in the community.
By the end, we was-- we was over six figures.
Between sneaker sponsors
and local people to sponsor it through events,
we were definitely over $100,000.
- And he built strong relationships,
not just with the shoe companies,
but college coaches.
- That, at a very young age, put him in a position
to where he had some power with the college coaches,
because now he had a lot of the top players
on his AAU team.
And that's when I think he got people's attention
in the basketball world-- not just the AAU world,
but also the college basketball world.
[poignant music]
- At this point, I've already got a shoe deal.
I've already got money.
It makes no sense to me to go to school.
I knew what I wanted to do.
My first job in the basketball business,
I got hired as the manager and director
for a financial services company.
And my first year there, I signed two first-round picks.
- The Philadelphia 76ers select Elfrid Payton
from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
- I ended up signing Elfrid Payton and Rodney Hood.
♪ ♪
Things went wrong when I wanted to work
on the agent side of the business.
As I had some success,
other agencies approached me to come work for their firms,
and I decided to go with Andy Miller.
Andy Miller is one of the best agents that's ever lived.
Andy's definitely negotiated
over a billion dollars in contracts,
and he definitely has had dozens of first-round picks.
- Andy Miller is, you know,
one of the top agents in basketball.
He's a guy that, you know,
had built a pretty impressive agency at ASM.
- Andy just offered me-- he recruited me.
He wanted to hire me.
Andy was giving me more money.
So it was a business situation, and it was a--
I thought a situation that can further my career more.
[intriguing music]
- We--I was just a agent there.
- Yeah, a agent, junior agent,
whatever you wanna call it.
- No, Christian at ASM was a runner, you know.
He was the guy that was out recruiting.
He was a relationship guy.
- I did agent duties.
I did deals for players. I ran the pre-draft.
Like, what does that mean?
If you ask Andy, who employed me,
he wouldn't have said, "Oh, yeah, Christian's my runner."
Like, what does that even mean?
- I mean, a runner is a generic term used in the industry
for one that goes out and runs around and recruits.
He would, you know, meet with the families.
He'd go to the AAU tournaments.
He would help manage the players
once they were secured by the agency.
- I recruited the clients.
I prepared materials for recruiting meetings.
I did all the updates. I did the work.
- He was sort of, you know--
a manager, I guess, would be a nice way of calling it,
but a runner's probably the more appropriate term
in the industry.
- Andy wasn't like,
"Oh, just go get some players and then--"
No, it was,
"I'm training you to be an agent."
I love Andy Miller to death,
but we were like Whitney and Bobby.
We shouldn't have been together.
- Christian's value to Andy Miller was--
was, you know, irreplaceable.
You couldn't put a value on it, you know?
Christian was able to do all things
that Andy Miller couldn't do,
that he was too old to do, probably,
probably too white to do.
He would do the things that would be necessary
to foster that relationship with the player,
to keep them with the agency.
- I literally signed with ASM and Andy Miller
because of Christian.
Andy couldn't have recruited me, you know what I mean?
We have a great relationship now
because I signed with him through Christian.
And Andy was probably my agent in all my paperwork,
but Christian was the one who did everything for me.
And mostly Christian kind of shaped me,
pointed me in the right direction
to end up where I am now.
Make no mistake about it, he is like a mastermind
when it comes to the basketball agency world,
and it's not up for debate
that he was great at what he did.
- For a young guy, Christian was incredibly well-connected.
It was no question.
21, 22 years old at the time, and I think people thought,
"This is--this could be the next big thing."
- No one could complain about the actual representation.
It was the small things that didn't get handled correctly
because Andy is like, "I'm gonna get it done
by any means," and so am I.
And sometimes, especially in a business
as small as the agent business, you gotta kind of be
a little bit more politically correct than we were.
My former company was
very upset about the departure.
Andy informed me that he had been notified
that my former employer
filed a complaint with local authorities
and the NBA Players Association
about me, allegedly,
stealing $40,000 in Uber rides.
Uber-gate.
[ominous music]
♪ ♪
It got tons of media coverage.
When I seen it, I'm like, "Oh, shit.
This is--this is damaging."
When you hear it, it sounds disgusting,
like I was just-- at that point,
I must have been just, like, "Driving Miss Daisy,"
just, like, in the car all day.
I never stole the Amex card belonging Elfrid Payton.
What happened was,
I was working for his financial advisor.
I was essentially a part of his financial team.
Elfrid Payton was in the rookie-sophomore game
at All-Star Weekend.
He directs me to put his card in my Uber account,
to get rides when his family requested.
After I left the company that I was with
and went over to work for Andy,
his card stayed in my Uber account.
As I'm working for Andy's company,
I was basically doing most of the recruiting
for the whole company.
There was numerous people using my Uber account.
At that time, the wrong card was being charged.
NBA Players Association Union reaches out.
They wanna know what's up.
Obviously, the union knew I wasn't certified with them.
Andy, at that point, said that he had to sever ties
because the union was on him,
and had to make stuff look as if, like, it was a split.
♪ ♪
It was a bunch of small things that added up
to be pretty fucking significant.
I went too fast...
And...
it fucked us all.
[dramatic music]
Uber-gate was done in May '17.
Uber-gate sped up what was gonna be
the inevitable anyway.
♪ ♪
- Christian wanted to start his own sports agency.
So at that point, you know, he came and met with me.
I took him to lunch.
I explained to him some of the concerns
that I had with what he was trying to accomplish.
And, um, you know, he went off and did his own thing.
- Andy and I, we essentially agree to
all my clients--I had maybe a dozen clients in the NBA--
I'm gonna be their manager
as opposed to being their agent.
And I'm gonna build up my own business independently
as a management company, and he'll represent my players
on its NBA team contract.
I would have handled the day-to-day management,
facilitated their relationships with the agent,
being Andy, the financial advisor,
whoever that may be.
We would do marketing deals.
Essentially, I would be the quarterback of the entire team.
I needed funding to make
the management company a reality.
- Christian, I think, was just overeager.
The thing was, though, because of the way
this business was going to have to operate,
they needed untraceable cash.
That's what you create with these rules.
Instead of just it all being on the up and up,
you have to hide it because of amateurism.
[foreboding music]
♪ ♪
The NCAA thinks
you have to play for the love of the game
and can't get paid to play sports.
It's amateurism.
Amateurism to college athletics is just their--their theory
that allows them to not pay the student-athletes
other than a scholarship, room and board.
- The issue of pay for play will not go away.
They'll--continue to be people that say,
"These are professionals,
and they ought to be paid like professionals,"
and I couldn't disagree more.
I think that would be the complete death
of college athletics.
- The NCAA puts legislation or rules in place
that the colleges have to follow
if you wanna be able to participate
in their events, in their tournaments.
- The NCAA thinks because of this concept of amateurism,
they can stop the wheels of capitalism
in the United States of America.
Never gonna happen.
The way the system works, it--
you end up dealing with unsavory people
or ridiculous circumstances.
[pensive music]
♪ ♪
- Marty Blazer's a former business manager,
financial person.
I knew him because LaMarr Woodley,
who would sponsor our AAU team in the beginning--
grassroots, in the beginning-- is from Saginaw.
Marty represented LaMarr.
LaMarr would fund our team, give us donations.
- And so because LaMarr said Marty was a good guy,
Christian felt comfortable
to begin a relationship with Blazer,
and he knew Blazer had some money.
- I was never close to Marty Blazer.
I literally think Marty Blazer's an idiot.
But I did meet Munish through Marty.
Marty Blazer represented players
in conjunction with Munish.
Munish was the chairman of a bank.
He was a very connected person.
I met Munish because he was trying to recruit athletes,
to manage their money
and to be their financial advisor.
- It was really hard for me to understand how
they ever came together, just socially.
"What do these two guys have in common?"
But in many ways,
that was sort of the brilliance of Christian.
- Munish and I had built a strong relationship,
we had become partners,
and we were gonna do our thing.
We were specifically funding players
and families with the hope
that they would one day sign with us
when the time came.
The competition to sign players is a--
it's a blood sport.
The most valuable and the most immediate return
is gonna come off of players who are first-round picks.
There's only 30 players every year in the entire world
who get drafted first round and get guaranteed money.
- Everyone's trying to chase this lottery ticket.
Only one ultimate goal for every one of them: NBA.
And it is a very tough path to get to.
It's very hard to make.
It's very expensive to make the NBA now.
- Providing resources or paying players and a family
is the cost of doing business, basically.
[dramatic music]
The business model of financing prospects
before they actually turn pro, it's 100% a gamble.
You could fund a kid for years. You could sign him.
You could fucking do everything right.
He could fire you at the end and go with somebody else,
and that person who's done nothing gets everything.
That is the realities of the representation business.
- You have these high-probability
multimillionaires sitting there.
People are going to try to represent them
and get in business with them.
Nothing, no NCAA rule book is gonna stop that.
- The first time I paid a player was probably 2015,
as--like, actually, like, paid someone, okay,
to sign with us.
Everyone knew Andy was paying players.
Andy been paying players since I was born.
This wasn't a...like, a secret.
One player can pay for ten.
So if you're talking about spinning $50,000
to make $5 million,
I would think, you know,
people in Silicon Valley would like those odds.
The NBA Draft Lottery in 2017 was the first time
I heard about any investment stuff.
I was in New York City at the Draft Lottery.
Munish said he wanted to introduce me to Jeff,
who was this real estate mogul who wants to get into sports.
I'm like, "Fine."
Jeff D'Angelo
is a very rich person
with relationships and connections
in Miami, the club scene, in New York City.
He's an Italian guy.
Looks--seems to be mid-thirties.
Looks like he could be, like, on "Jersey Shore" a little bit.
His personality was whatever, but he had a lot of money.
[riveting music]
Unbeknownst to me in the beginning,
Munish was introduced to Jeff D'Angelo
by Marty Blazer.
Marty basically brokered the idea of
Jeff D'Angelo being the investment vehicle
to fund the management company.
Me, Munish, and Jeff
were the attendees for the first meeting.
We have lunch at the Redeye Grill.
I'm trying to explain to Jeff
how the system works, what I do.
My plan was to use my relationships
with high school and grassroots programs,
try to embed myself with them early,
get them paid, and when it is time for them to turn pro,
I'm able to represent them.
- It was a productive meeting, it seemed.
Seemed like we were gonna make some progress.
I said to Munish, "This seems too good to be true."
It's too good to be true because the numbers
that he was willing to spend make no financial sense.
- He said, "I don't have a budget.
Whatever you need."
You can't recoup whatever you need.
So it just seemed like it was too easy,
but they invested into Munish's fund.
And once that happened, Munish was like,
"Listen, it seems like bullshit,
"but they did transfer over money to invest,
and it seems real."
- I was told it was a million dollars.
- Yeah.
- Okay.
- Wha--
- Yeah.
[dramatic string music]
♪ ♪
I have a meeting on a yacht
in Battery Park, New York City.
♪ ♪
The yacht belonged to Jeff D'Angelo.
I was told, like, this is the--
the inception of a new company.
Obviously, I'm the head of it,
and they were happy to be in business with me.
And, um, they wanted to celebrate.
It was Jeff, Munish Sood,
Alicia Carroll, Munish's assistant...
Jill.
Jill Bailey was Jeff D'Angelo's partner
in their real estate mogul-dom.
Marty Blazer was on that fucking boat too.
Everyone's in a festive mood.
Everyone's happy, excited.
They popping champagne.
I don't drink, so I'm like,
"I don't care about any of that kind of stuff."
I literally was just like, the whole time,
"Give me my money. We roll."
- Okay.
- Yeah.
♪ ♪
- Yeah.
And we officially execute the partnership agreement,
operating agreement between Jeff D'Angelo,
Munish Sood, and myself,
start LOYD Management Inc.
I always called my management company, LOYD Inc.,
stands for "Live Out Your Dreams,"
the same company name I've always had
from when I was doing events back in Saginaw.
I get 50K cash that day.
- I didn't think it was strange initially
about the 50K cash because it was the first payment,
like a celebratory moment, you know,
wanna show off a little bit.
We got the 50.
"Let's make sure it's in the account, Munish."
I don't wanna fly with 50K.
There's no way I'm getting on a plane with 50K.
I gave it to Munish's assistant,
deposited it in the bank account,
and we move forward.
- Now that I think back,
they just was trying to set me up.
[uneasy music]
♪ ♪
The yacht meeting, they made it clear
that they wanted money to funnel
through the college coaches
and from the college coaches to the players.
Their reason for paying the coaches is to have
another level of protection and hopefully,
the coaches would steer players
towards our management company.
They didn't want to do it
the way I was traditionally doing it,
which was through the players and the parents.
- So whether I get players from the way I wanna do it
or the way he wants to do it,
as long as we have results and we are bringing in clients,
it won't matter.
If we have success and we sign players,
if he's my true partner,
he's not gonna give a shit anyway.
- Yeah.
- Right.
- In reality, the reason for them,
from their vantage point, to pay the coaches
was to fuck us, basically,
and to get us in a situation where we were,
"bribing" the coaches.
In reality, Jeff D'Angelo and Jill Bailey
are undercover FBI agents.
In reality, they consider
the colleges coaches to be public officials.
So by giving money to a public official
in return for a favor,
that is essentially bribery.
They wanted me to use my relationships with coaches
to execute on that vision,
to essentially set me up to commit a felony--
or multiple felonies.
Book Richardson is the assistant coach
at the University of Arizona.
Sean Miller is the head coach at University of Arizona.
Book was loyal to Sean.
Arizona was definitely more open
to getting some shit done.
- I don't know these people.
I don't wanna ruffle any feathers.
I know I need to get this funding in place.
So at that point, I wasn't gonna
completely shoot down
everything I thought that, you know,
he believed was the way to do business.
I just wanted to get out of there,
get the money, and move forward.
- At the end of the day, Christian wanted to maintain
as much of a relationship as he could with D'Angelo
because he was funding LOYD Management.
He was the one who was paying the money.
This is a dream come true for a kid like Christian.
But you gotta understand.
He'd never seen $50,000 before.
He's got 50,000.
He's got a partnership agreement
that has $250,000 written on it with his name on it.
♪ ♪
They signed the agreement and, you know,
Christian goes off and now he starts
his new partnership with Jeff D'Angelo
and Jill Bailey, the FBI agents.
♪ ♪
- I learned about this story back in 2016.
At the time, I'd been at "The Wall Street Journal"
for about two years, and I had been hired there
to cover New York courts and criminal justice.
And I moved to the sports beat in mid-2016
and sort of, like, looking around for stories.
I think I made a joke about how I didn't know
what I was doing in sports,
and I missed my reporting on public corruption.
And somebody who came from my previous beat
sort of made a joke to me
in around November or December of 2016
that I might not be so far afield.
And sure enough, there was this one case
that I found involving this guy named Marty Blazer,
and the SEC complaints against him
were just fascinating.
- Marty had his issues that were known
with the Securities' investigation for
"misappropriating" client money,
or stealing money.
- He took his clients' money and invested it
in some film projects that he was working on.
- You literally cannot make this up.
- He had stole millions of dollars
from clients of his to make a movie or some shit.
- Um, one of them was called, "Mafia the Movie."
[thunder booms]
[lighter clicks] - I know who you are.
Blood on your hands represents the lives I've taken.
[eerie music]
It's the gangster business...
[gunshot]
And I love it.
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- I didn't know he was, like, having a Ponzi scheme
to become a, um--he had ambitions to be a movie mogul
and was fucking taking players' money to do it.
- The SEC confronted him.
They said, "We're gonna charge you."
- And he was being indicted on all kinds of fraud charges,
identity theft, securities fraud.
And when he sat down with the U.S. attorney...
- And he said, "Wait, wait, wait.
Don't arrest me just yet. I can help you."
- He told them he had some information
that could be of value perhaps,
that could provide him some relief with his case.
- "I know about this whole scheme
"to bribe coaches,
and I can help you investigate this."
- The origin of the entire case was
Marty Blazer.
- Yeah, CW-1 is Marty Blazer,
cooperating witness number one.
So he was the first informant.
- For a lot of that, he was on his own.
He didn't have FBI agents
alongside him as business partners.
So in the early years of this,
it was just him going around, meeting people
and saying, um, you know,
"Do you want some cash?"
You know, "We can work together.
I can introduce you to this guy."
And he's recording it himself.
It's sort of like a freelance operation.
♪ ♪
[phone line trills]
♪ ♪
[phone line trills]
[both laugh] - How you doing--
- And this is the genesis on the entire case.
A three-year FBI investigation
was created by Marty Blazer,
trying to get out of trouble.
- Marty was recruiting our players
that we was involved with at ASM.
Marty wants to, you know, build a relationship.
- So he's trying to get a lower sentence,
and he's just throwing darts against the wall of stuff
that he can bring to the table.
Munish was one of the people he said
that was involved with paying players.
They got enough evidence to tap Munish's phone.
Once they do that,
they talk--hear me talking to Munish, obviously,
because I talk to Munish all the time.
They know of our plans. They know I need funding.
They turn--they get to Marty.
Marty makes the introduction to the--to the undercovers.
And then, um, June 6, 2017,
we were in a yacht in Battery Park.
- On June 20th, Christian set up meetings
for Merl--Merl Code and Book Richardson
to go meet with Jeff D'Angelo.
[soft suspenseful music]
- This is only 14 days after the yacht.
Christian is talking to Book, and he literally tells him,
"I've hyped you up." Right?
"This is what I think you can get out of him."
- Book's saying, "Hey, thanks a lot.
What can I do for you?"
And Christian says, "You don't have to do anything for me.
"I'm Gucci. I don't--I'm good.
I don't need anything."
And Book then gets out of the cab,
goes into the meeting,
and he gets his $5,000 from Jeff D'Angelo.
- Oh, I know, I know, I know.
- Merl also is on the way over to meet with the FBI.
- Merl Code is a mentor of mine.
I met him through Andy.
Merl's working for Adidas.
Merl was a facilitator and a relationship person,
but also someone who-- who helped us recruit.
He wasn't a equity partner, but we were so close.
We had the resources.
I'm like, "I'll pay Merl to open doors for me,
"help me build relationships, maintain relationships.
"Merl's good--been good to me.
I wanna make sure he can eat too."
- And Christian's telling him,
"Look, this is what you need to do.
"Let D'Angelo know that you can provide
a great value to LOYD Management."
- And Merl says, "Well, how? How can I do that?"
And Christian's like,
"Merl, just give them any fucking name.
They don't know what they're talking about."
- [laughs]
- For Merl too, this was nothing other than
Merl telling Jeff D'Angelo what Jeff D'Angelo
wanted to hear, get money out of him.
And the lack of respect that Christian exhibited
was almost immediate.
So there was really no relationship at all,
even in the beginning of them
coming together to form LOYD Management.
He had no interest in bribing coaches.
He wanted the money from the FBI
to run his sports agency.
[dramatic string music]
- All these things are being recorded, all these calls,
these thousands of hours of wiretaps.
'Cause it wasn't just my phone.
Numerous phones.
There's at least one person, if not more,
whose job is to just go in and focus only on
monitoring those phone calls.
♪ ♪
- Mm-hmm.
So in my head, I'm like,
"He's just really that stupid.
"He doesn't understand how the business works
"if he thinks that it makes sense
to just go out here and pay coaches."
I was never, ever, ever
given a player directly from a coach.
Ever.
I never signed anyone.
If anything, I gotta fight the coaches
to keep them from going to-- they wanna keep them in school.
They don't want the fucking players
to leave and go to the NBA.
So I'm fighting with them.
They're not trying to push dudes--
push dudes to the NBA.
That's a lie.
The only person who does that is Kentucky
'cause they got five more coming.
- Christian has the players locked in, in theory,
before they ever get to the school.
[clears throat]
- Jeff D'Angelo is pushing, he's pushing, he's pushing
the whole model to pay the coaches because it fits
the government's narrative of bribery.
- I'm trying to tell him,
"That makes no fucking sense, bro."
Like, "What are you talking about?"
♪ ♪
[ominous string music]
- I'm like, "Whatever. Okay, cool."
What I was really trying to say was not,
"Let's just go to the strip club."
It was basically, like,
showing him how much of a waste of the money was.
Like, "If we're gonna just blow some money, let's--
"we might as well just take it and go have some fun
"because that's what's gonna be the value
that's gonna come out of it."
I mean, I was obviously being a degenerate by saying,
"Let's go to the strip club."
That was w--you know.
I might have been serious, who knows?
- My investor says, "100%, this is my money,"
essentially, "I'ma let you do you,
but you gonna fucking do what I tell you to do."
- It's on the phone calls.
You can hear it, the voice of the FBI agent
having an "oh, shit" moment.
He's stuttering. He's stammering.
You can hear the anxiety from him.
"He's not gonna do it. What are we gonna do now?"
Keep on pushing him. Keep on pushing him.
- And I figured that he was pretty adamant
about not funding me
if I didn't do what he wanted-- wanted me to do.
So at that point, I had to make a decision.
- And the decision I made was to
go along with his idea that we should fund coaches,
get the coaches to understand what was happening,
then I would just take the money
and put it in my bank account and keep it.
♪ ♪
And I was like, "Listen, if you think that
this makes sense, cool."
What I did, I called Merl,
said, "Listen, this guy's a fucking idiot."
Like, "There's nothing that we can do to save him."
- Literally, the same day within a couple hours,
he calls Merl Code up, telling Merl Code,
"I ain't gonna pay coaches."
"We gonna fucking set up these meetings.
"We're gonna tell the dude, D'Angelo,
"that these coaches are gonna get this amount of money.
We gonna take the money and keep it."
- Christian is on the phone, telling Merl,
"I tried to do things the right way.
"These guys won't listen to me, Merl.
"I've tried to explain it to them multiple fucking times.
They just won't listen."
- So I tell Merl, "Listen, line up some coaches,
and he'll give you the 8,000 a month."
Merl's like, "Cool."
I'ma tell them, "Spend 15, 20 minutes.
I'm not going to the meeting."
I'm not gonna be out here,
telling him to take no mo-- like all that shit.
We was both on the same page. Like, "This is dumb."
I didn't look at it like I'm stealing money from him
by setting up the meetings and just keeping the money.
I looked at it like, "I'm keeping my money
"because I'm responsible as a partner in this company
"to fucking keep the expenses low
and grow the profits."
- Christian and his friends, they were hustling the FBI.
There's no question about that.
That was a matter of just listening to the wiretaps
and hearing what they were saying.
But really, it was because Christian was trying
to tell this guy how LOYD Management should be run.
- [chuckles]
- The thing was Christian had no idea, really,
what D'Angelo was doing was trying to build a bribery case,
a coaches' bribery case.
Merl was saying the same thing we were saying.
"This fucking guy is stupid."
And so he's like, you know, "You gotta be very careful
coming off the Uber stuff."
You know, obviously, he knew what the deal was with Uber,
but he's like, "You gotta be careful.
"The way you handle your business,
you gotta clean your stuff up," which was true.
It was a fact.
[dramatic music]
I had knew someone who was formerly at the DA.
So I'm like, "Well, let me check with my source."
And this guy definitely-- retired DA,
worked over 20 years.
I wanted him to run a background check
on Jeff D'Angelo and Jill Bailey.
♪ ♪
I gave him the names,
told him to call me back when he got some information.
He had someone that he knew at the FBI
do a background check.
♪ ♪
Of course it comes up clean. Everything was above board.
Everything checked out of what they said.
So the guy who I knew who worked for the DA
calls me back.
"They're solid."
So that's all I needed to hear at that point.
Once we checked that out, I was like,
"I don't really need a PI.
I'll take that and roll with it."
We thought it was straight. Munish thought it was straight.
♪ ♪
It was the worst thing ever.
- There came a point in time in investigation
where everything turned towards, really,
Christian hustling Jeff D'Angelo
and trying to get as much money as he could
out of the FBI, not knowing they were the FBI,
and doing the exact opposite
of what they thought he was doing
the entire time with the money.
And it really culminates out in Las Vegas.
[dynamic music]
♪ ♪
- We met around late July, 2017.
We're in Vegas.
All the coaches in Division I basketball
are all in Vegas for the summer evaluation period
for the grassroots basketball.
So all the coaches were out there
to watch the young players that are out there playing.
The whole point of the Vegas trip
was to introduce college coaches to Jeff D'Angelo
because he wanted to be able to pay them.
I felt the easiest and most efficient way
to get everybody to knock it out,
instead of flying all over the country,
was to just have a meeting in Vegas,
get a room, and have meetings in the room.
I'm thinking, you know, a regular suite,
a suite at, you know, a local Marriott.
I get to the hotel, and, you know,
the suite's on one of the top floors,
one of the best suites they have in there.
I go in the suite.
It's huge, and I'm thinking to myself,
"This shit is crazy."
'Cause again, I'm going back to the numbers, like,
"What are we doing? This makes no sense."
It was ridiculous.
It was the best-- one of the best things
that they had in there.
It's laid out, drinks everywhere,
you know, wine, champagne, and a living room area, bar.
It was ridiculous. The room was crazy.
So in my head, I'm like,
"We're never gonna make money.
We've spent everything."
I wasn't even doing it from a moral high place.
I was down for some bullshit, but it makes no business sense.
Expenses have to recouped no matter what--
what way you look at it, the house has to always win,
or you don't have a house anymore.
You lose everything.
I call Munish that day.
I'm like, "I know we checked into everything,
but this isn't right."
And at that point, I'm like,
"Maybe they with the mafia or some shit like that."
Like, "Jeff is Italian--"
Not to be racist or stereotypical.
I'm like, "He's Italian. May--he's got all this money.
Maybe he's in the mafia."
- Christian has made it clear
he's not gonna give any coaches any money.
Christian contacts a lot of his close friends
that are college coaches, and he has a lot of them.
He contacts Corey Barker from Texas Christian,
he contacts Preston Murphy from Creighton,
Tony Bland from USC, and others.
And he tells them,
"Look, I need you to come and do me a favor.
We're gonna go meet with the investors."
- We told the coaches what was happening.
"Listen, bro, this guy's stupid.
"He is my investor. Just go in here.
I'ma take the money off the table."
And what I ended up doing was taking the money
and keeping it.
We was in Vegas. "Let's take some of it.
Let's have some fun."
You know, Tony definitely was aware
that we gonna go in here,
I'm gonna talk to him about some players,
they gonna put some money on the table,
I'm gonna take it.
He knew that.
I think it was 13K.
Tony didn't get it. I took off the table.
[soft dramatic music]
I was in Vegas. I just went gambling.
Sorry.
It was all kinds of money in that suite.
It was over 100K.
Jeff D'Angelo, he had a safe.
Whenever we needed some money,
he'd go to the safe and get the money out,
and it was real money.
It was never--it definitely wasn't five--I mean, fuck.
We had one meeting, there was 15K on the table.
I mean, it was-- it was a shit show.
And then fucking Marty Blazer popped up.
And that was around the time that I had just became aware
of the SEC stuff.
I was really hot that he was involved or around.
There's no purpose for him being in the meeting.
You know, Jeff is like, "Oh, he's out here with me.
It's fine. He's my guy."
I was just like,
"Yeah, no."
So after the Tony Bland meeting,
it was my last meeting of the day--of the night with
Jeff D'Angelo and Marty Blazer.
Later on that night,
I had another meeting with another coach
in a casino lobby.
As I'm leaving, walking on the casino floor,
I notice Blazer and D'Angelo
are together in the casino, gambling.
At that point, I just, you know,
didn't think anything of it and just left.
[tense music]
So after the Tony meeting,
we got, you know, roughly $13,000.
You know, we just went out. We--we partied.
We, um, did a little bit of gambling.
It wasn't a lot.
The rest was, you know, out at the club.
You know, stuff happens at the club.
You throw money and stuff like that.
And then the next morning,
the rest of the money was-- well, most of the money was
deposited in the LOYD business account.
♪ ♪
Essentially, the FBI funded a great party
for some coaches and myself to just hang out.
N-- [chuckles]
No one was with us that night
thinking that we're bribing each other.
No one.
I would think in Vegas, we spent...
everything all in, over 100K.
- Correct, I got worried after the Vegas trip.
- It got resolved because Jeff was out of the picture.
- I think at the end of July,
Jeff D'Angelo just no longer was part of the investigation,
and the explanation was that Jeff had some family business
he had to tend to over in Europe.
- Jeff D'Angelo's mother...
is supposedly sick in Sicily,
and he's going over to take care of his dying mother.
I was like, "All right, cool.
Fine by me."
- At that point,
the government did not replace him with anyone.
They just went forward with Jill Bailey.
- I didn't wanna deal with him anymore anyway.
Jill was better and easier to work with.
Jill was much more convincing and appealing
from the standpoint of having a partner.
She just had her shit together better.
[desolate music]
♪ ♪
September 25th, I flew up from Atlanta.
I'm supposed to meet Jill,
and Jeff is supposed to be back.
Supposed to have this "come to Jesus" meeting
with everyone about the structure
and the budgets and the, uh--
the plans for the-- for the year.
I was late for the meeting.
The meeting was at the W Hotel in Times Square.
So I go over to the hotel, to W.
Jill's in the-- she comes down to the lobby
to get me, to bring me up.
[dramatic music]
So we go upstairs.
I walk into the suite,
and I see two guys I've never seen.
I'm like, "This is strange."
♪ ♪
We sit down.
I'm not saying anything
'cause I don't know these dudes.
I'm thinking, "Jeff is supposed to be here."
He's not there.
I start talking about some basketball players
and maybe some games in the NBA that just happened,
just trying to, you know, have a normal convo
'cause I'm thinking we're waiting for Jeff
to get there to talk about the real business.
♪ ♪
And then Jill pulls out her badge.
She goes, "Christian, I'm a undercover FBI agent,
and you can save yourself."
And I'm looking at her like,
"What the fuck are you talking about?"
So I start laughing.
She's like--like, shaking her head like,
"No, I'm serious," like, "This is real."
I just said to her, like, "Yo, you gotta be shitting me.
You're fucking lying."
At this point, in my head,
I go back to thinking about the whole,
"This must be some Uber-gate shit."
I'm, like, trying to say to them,
"Listen, the Uber thing wasn't me."
They're like, "No, we already--
Uber is the least of our concerns."
"We already know what the deal is there.
That's not what we're here for."
So I'm looking at them like,
"What the fuck are we here for then?"
And they said, "You've done a lot of shit that's illegal."
And then I'm like, "I don't even--"
I basically was like, "I don't even fucking believe
this is real."
It was a white guy and a black guy and Jill.
The white guys pulls out a computer...
and then he starts playing phone calls of me.
This is the fucking FBI.
So I was like, "Okay, wha-- what y'all want?"
That's when Jill was like,
"Give us Rick Pitino and Andy Miller,
and we'll--you'll be fine."
[foreboding music]
I had multiple phones at the time.
On one of my phones,
Sean Miller happened to be calling me.
When my phone rings, their phone rings.
Like, that shit was, like, duplicated, basically.
And I'm like, "Oh, shit.
This is-- can't be a coincidence."
They have my--like, my phone is their phone, basically.
This shit is crazy.
And I said to them--I said, "Okay, I'ma work with y'all."
I'm thinking I can say that and just leave out the room.
I'm stupid.
I basically tried to give them Marty Blazer, people like that.
I'm like, "I'll give you information
on how I feel about them."
They was like, "We already know that you don't like Marty.
That doesn't count. It doesn't work."
And then, "We want the-- we want people like Rick
and Andy and Sean Miller."
At that point, I start to stand up
'cause I needed a fucking deep breath
'cause I'm like, "This is really real.
They're going to really try this shit."
And so I said to them-- I stood up.
I said, like, "What's gonna happen?"
I said, "I ca--I'm not gonna actually go to jail
or anything like that."
And they're like, "Well, who's to say?
It's not up to us. It's up to the judge."
After that, I'm like, "Oh, shit."
That's when I got, like, hot,
and fucking taking my shirt off.
I was just so, like, hot.
I don't know how to really describe it,
but I was like-- it was overwhelming.
Basically, by the end of the meeting,
I'm in there like a R&B singer,
like, shirt off and just some jeans on.
[dramatic music]
And they were like, "Listen, Christian,
"you gotta make a decision.
"If you gonna be with us,
"you need to start wearing a wire now
"and start calling people now.
"We're gonna be here all night.
You're either in or you out, or you can get a lawyer."
So I said to them I needed to get a lawyer.
And as soon as I said I needed to get a lawyer...
The doors of the suite just burst open.
[ominous music]
The team that they send to arrest criminals
that you would see on TV
or you seen in movies, they all bust out the doors
and they've got real guns pointed in my face.
At this point, I'm like,
"Well, they just gonna fucking kill me," like,
"It's over. I died 'cause of basketball."
It was multiple machine guns in my face.
I just put my head down 'cause I'm like,
"You know, I don't wanna see them shoot me."
I was beyond terrified
because I couldn't even comprehend what was going on.
That morning, I'm leaving Atlanta,
thinking that we're having a company meeting.
That afternoon, I have machine guns in my face.
At that point, they put the handcuffs on me.
And from there, they basically was like,
"Listen, you can talk to your lawyer,
"and we can make some kind of deal
and try to get you out of this."
And at that point, it kind of was what it was.
[unsettling music]
What happens next, they was like,
"We gotta take you closer to the courthouse,
"and it's gonna be--you gonna be in a federal holding cell,
"where, like, you know, some of the people
that are in lockdown and other situations like that are at."
So I'm like, "Okay, that doesn't sound good."
♪ ♪
So when I--when I go through the process
of getting registered, basically,
I'm in a room by myself because they're trying to get
my situation ready in the cell.
And then they fingerprinted me and did their whole thing,
and then they take me to the cell.
Where the cell was, was, like, a long hallway.
When I went down--when I got there, it was loud.
Like, you know, people were
talking and screaming and shit.
[ominous string music]
So I'm like, "Okay, this is gonna be fun."
They take me to the cell.
This is when I knew shit was gonna be crazy, okay?
[chuckling] Um...
The dude I'm in a cell with...
The last thing I heard him say to the guard,
"I'ma fucking kill you."
So in my head--
again, I've never been in no situation like this.
I'm like, "If he gonna fucking kill the guard,
"I'm--this shit is over with for me.
I might as well cancel Christmas."
[uneasy music]
I'm like, "I'm just not gonna say nothing."
Maybe, like, a hour go by of me just being quiet...
and eventually, he goes,
"What are you here for?"
[sighs] So I told him.
He's like, "Yeah, no, you here for something else.
"They didn't fucking put you in here or arrest you
for paying some basketball players."
I'm like, "I swear, bro."
I'm a curious person,
so I started to have questions,
and I was like, you know,
"Who are some of the people that's around?"
And then he was like, "El Chapo's upstairs."
"What?"
And I'm thinking, "Okay, how could I be
in the same vicinity as El Chapo?"
This cannot be real life right now.
No disrespect to El Chapo and what they got going on,
but now I gotta get the fuck out of here.
[solemn music]
And then maybe around 5:00 that morning,
they came to pick me up,
and I end up waiting with the agents
to see the judge to do arraignment.
- No.
Dude, this was some third-world shit.
No phone call.
They did--I didn't even get offered to get a phone call.
- When I got out, they-- I called--
I had a public defender
'cause I couldn't talk to any lawyer.
So I had a public defender.
And when I got out, I asked her.
I used her phone to, one,
see who else got arrested, and, two, call my mom.
- Hailee, um, that's my daughter.
She said, "Mommy, Christian's on the phone.
He can talk to you."
- The call to my mom was the first time I had cried,
and the reason why I cried was because
my sister was on the phone too, and my sister can make me cry.
And my mom basically is like,
"Stop fucking crying."
- So I told him, I said, "Hey, Christian."
Um, "Did you kill someone?"
- "Did you hurt somebody?" "No."
- And I said, "Did you rape someone?"
He said, "No."
- "Did you do anything to anybody?"
"No."
- "Did you steal from someone?" - "No."
- I said, "Excuse my language.
Suck it the fuck up and you're coming home."
- "Don't let nobody see you crying in here,
"go in there in front of that judge,
plead not guilty, and come home."
- And we hung up,
and he was home later on that night.
[camera shutters clicking]
- Good afternoon. My name is Joon Kim.
I'm the acting United States attorney
for the Southern District of New York.
Today, we announce charges of fraud and corruption
in the world of college basketball.
- I learned Christian was arrested.
I was sitting in my office,
and I get a phone call from Christian's father.
And he's just screaming in the phone,
"Turn on ESPN! You're not gonna believe it."
And I've known Lou for a long time,
and I've never heard Lou in such a state of panic.
So I turned on ESPN.
I was watching the press conference,
and I saw the diagram and I see Christian's name.
And I didn't even know at that point
what it was about.
- Coaches at some of the nation's top programs
soliciting and accepting cash bribes.
Managers and financial advisors
circling blue-chip prospects like coyotes.
Dawkins was an athlete recruiter
for a sports agency
who was trying to start his own
sports management business.
- You know, at the time,
the press conference was pretty impressive.
You know, I was thinking, "Wow.
"They're gonna do something here.
They're gonna--they're gonna really get some people."
- The madness of college basketball
went well beyond the big dance in March.
Month after month,
the defendants exploited the hoop dreams
of student-athletes around the country,
allegedly treating them as little more
than opportunities to enrich themselves
through bribery and fraud schemes.
- First time I heard about it was, like,
a quiet September morning.
Southern District of New York announces
the arrest of ten men,
including four active college basketball coaches
for bribery and fraud,
and that was a bombshell.
- After I was arrested, Book Richardson was arrested,
Lamont Evans was arrested, Tony Bland was arrested,
Merl Code was arrested, Jim Gatto was arrested,
Munish Sood was arrested.
I mean, ran up in they house, kicked they doors down.
Someone was in the shower, pulled them out the shower,
you know, arrested them
in front of they kids, they family.
- And so you said, "How big could this get
if this is what they're doing?"
- The FBI is charging ten people
with fraud and corruption in college basketball.
- Well, this extensive FBI investigation
might as well be right out of a movie:
wiretaps, undercover agents, and informants.
- The FBI is involved,
and they're going after everybody.
- I think it'll be the biggest scandal
in the history of college basketball.
It could be one of the biggest scandals
we've ever seen in sports.
- You know, probably the one thing I remember
from the press conference more than anything was,
"We got your playbook."
- Today's arrests should serve as a warning to others
choosing to conduct business this way
in the world of college athletics.
We have your playbook.
- I knew having been a prosecutor,
you're not gonna make a statement like that
unless you probably got something to back it up.
- I mean, the Southern District of New York
is known for, you know, bringing the high pro--
highest profile cases that exist in America.
They don't--they don't charge anything
unless politically,
they're gonna make an example of somebody.
- You know, the Southern District of New York,
they call themselves-- or the joke is that they're,
"the Sovereign District of New York," you know?
Even if cases aren't specifically in Manhattan,
they sort of see the world as their canvas.
- They don't lose.
They don't make mistakes.
These are very, very smart people.
- They wanted to make an example of what
they thought was the problem with college basketball.
- Christian was--was portrayed
as sort of the centerpiece of this whole thing.
He was the one they went after as, "Here's our kingpin."
- He was somebody that the government
could point a finger at and say, "See?
"That's what we're talking about.
"This is what's wrong with college basketball--
that guy, Christian Dawkins."
- It's kind of crazy when you think of it like that,
like, everything was centered around me
like I invented all this shit.
The paying players has been going on for a hundred years.
Okay?
So that's not something that's brand new.
- Anybody who knows anything about college basketball
or this world knows if they are gonna arrest four guys,
they could arrest 40, they could arrest 80.
If you have the right middle person,
the right AAU coach, the right runner,
the right whatever who says, "I'll tell you everything,
"and I'll make a plea deal
that can implicate who knows how many people."
[soft dramatic music]
- My initial conversation with the U.S. Attorney's office
was about Rick Pitino, specifically.
- Rick's name-- when they arrested me,
they said to me very clearly in no uncertain terms,
"We want you to give us Rick Pitino."
They gave me the opportunity to work with them,
wear a wire, fucking not have to go to prison,
no--not even be charged,
and just give them Pitino and Andy.
- Their interest in Christian cooperating was...
Tha--I think was the whole plan
of how they were gonna bring things down
and how this case was gonna blow up into
what they professed it would be at the press conference.
- We're pretty confident.
- You know, my understanding of the conviction rate
with the Southern District of New York is,
you know, 95 to 97%.
- I was fully prepared to fight.
We admitted from day one, we did--we paid the players.
There's no point in hiding that.
It's not illegal.
There's no law in the world that says
breaking a NCAA rule is a federal felony.
There's no law that says that.
They twisted the law to make it fit.
- When Christian refused to cooperate,
they became laser-focused on punishing him.
[menacing music]
- I was charged with wire fraud,
honest services fraud,
conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
I think we had money laundering
at one point on there.
I was charged with bribery. Dude, it was so much shit.
My maximum sentence was 200 years.
I was like, "Yeah, no, this can't be real."
- [chuckles] I'll put it like this.
After we were charged, I go to the ATM.
I put my ATM card in the machine, and it ate it.
Fucking card didn't come back out.
I never seen nothing like that before.
So that's really what I got by with,
was money I just had around my house.
All my bank accounts were irrelevant.
I had, you know, at home,
close to 90,000.
- Yeah, I had saved up money.
[laughing]
I had some money saved,
and luckily, I did.
If I didn't have that,
I would have been fucking screwed.
- All of it--most of that money was FBI money.
If it wasn't for them having that dumbass idea
to pay coaches, I wouldn't have any money
to pay my attorneys and to live off of.
I would have had nothing.
[soft dramatic music]
- As I'm looking at this evidence with Christian,
it's very difficult to do because there's so much of it.
So I learned then that they had wiretapped his phone,
not for, like, a day...
[laughs] For, like, three months.
So I said to Christian,
"Would you be concerned about anything
"that they would hear you talking about on your phone
"for the periods of time
of June 2017 through September?"
And he said, "If they got my phone, I'm fucked."
[laughs]
You know, so at that point,
I realized this was probably gonna be a tough case.
You know, we made a decision that no matter how painful,
no matter how expensive, we were gonna have a trial,
two of them, if necessary, and we did.
♪ ♪
- The first trial was for defrauding universities.
It was a fraud trial.
- It was a two-count wire fraud case,
and it was honest-- honest services as well,
um, that the schools were victimized by the conduct.
And Louisville was professed to be
the, uh--the victim in that case.
- Codefendants in that case were Merl Code and Jim Gatto.
Jim Gatto was the person
who did the deals for NBA players with Adidas.
Jim Gatto was Merl Code's boss.
Jim Gatto's a unbelievable person,
obviously, was loyal to Adidas,
had been at Adidas for 20-something years,
and was trying to help one of his flagship schools.
- The first case was a slam dunk,
factual case for the government.
There was no way we could defend factually
what happened with Christian Dawkins
and Bowen family.
- I had a relationship with Brian Bowen Jr.
and his family dating back to when he was in middle school.
He played for my Dorian's Pride AAU Team.
I was providing benefits, or resources,
to the family off and on
from early in his high school career.
Brian Bowen's father 100% made it very clear to me
he's not going to school if he doesn't get paid.
And when he made the decision to go to Louisville,
at that point, yes, I did step in and try to,
um, create some level of assistance.
The family's supposed to receive $100,000.
- Brian Bowen's father, under oath, federal court,
said, "Oklahoma State:
"150,000, car, a house.
Creighton: $100,000."
Oregon was a astronomical number.
Arizona--hundreds--tens,
hundreds, thousand dollars out there.
Some of these schools aren't even
big-time basketball programs.
Creighton...
This is what these kids are worth.
- The University of Louisville's Rick Pitino,
one of the winningest coaches in college basketball history,
effectively fired today amid an FBI investigation
that has exposed what looks like
the dark underbelly of the NCAA.
- The only reason why the FBI even knows
or could prove anything was because fucking...
Adidas was late on the money.
I had to figure out a way to get the father
what was promised him.
And I went to Jeff D'Angelo,
and he was like, "I'll put up the money."
And at that point, obviously, that's FBI money.
They knew what was happening. They had a paper trail.
And they wrapped everything into it that way.
- If Adidas just does the shit quicker
or if Brian Sr. doesn't need the money
that bad at that time,
there's no way they would have even known.
It just was a bunch of bad luck.
- The defense never denied that the money got paid out.
- And there's no way to deny that because
there were cooperating witnesses
who actually made the money transfer.
They gave the guy the money.
- Muni Sood cooperated with the government,
provided testimony against Christian Dawkins
and Merl Code.
- They call back the verdict.
We lose.
[solemn music]
- He got six months, was the sentence,
which we appealed,
which allowed him to be out on an appeal bond,
awaiting a decision to see if we have a right
to a new trial because it was such a unique case
that had never been really tried before
in the history of the country.
- A legal precedent has been set.
In theory, they're saying,
"If you cause an athlete to no longer be eligible
for his scholarship, you've defrauded a school,"
which is a felony now, a federal felony.
Now that could mean any booster
that gives any money to an athlete.
That could be the local pizza shop,
when the kid comes in and he's the star quarterback,
and say, "Here's a free slice of pizza."
You've now made these players ineligible.
Have you just defrauded this massive university?
I don't know.
- If was giving that same money to a professional player,
it's totally fine.
But if I was giving that money to someone
who was in high school,
who just didn't go to college,
who just was like, "I'm not going to the NCAA.
I'ma go to the D-League," it's totally fine.
But just because someone wants to play basketball in college,
it's wire fraud?
It does--that doesn't even make common sense to me.
- But it's also crazy when Louisville
pretty undeniably is one of the dirtiest,
most noncompliant schools
in the history of college basketball.
- Yeah, this was not Louisville's first
NCAA infractions rodeo.
They've been down this path a few times.
- I am beyond pissed off that government
is implying that we victimized a university,
and in my particular case,
a university that just had came off of a...
whore scandal on campus.
- The University of Louisville men's basketball team
isn't commenting on allegations
that the team provided escorts to have sex with recruits.
- Tina Powell says she brought girls
to perform at Billy Minardi Hall
22 times between 2010 and 2014.
- That, obviously, is frowned upon by the NCAA rule book.
- No one got fired.
Fuck charged and with felonies.
No one even got a slap on the wrist.
Yeah, you take down a national championship banner.
Okay, they still won a national championship, bro.
If you can survive a whore scandal,
you can survive anything.
If this was Cleveland State,
the fucking whole team would be done.
This was--if this was Western Michigan,
the whole program would be out of here.
And they would try to-- the NCAA would try to
save face by punishing someone like that,
but they're not gonna fucking punish the real schools
'cause they make too much money off of them.
[soft piano music]
These are sponsorship deals
that the different shoe companies have
with particular colleges.
You have UCLA and Under Armour,
there's $280 million, which is ridiculous.
Ohio State, football school, mainly,
but also is a pretty big-time basketball program.
They bringing in $252 million with Nike.
Texas and Nike,
they're bringing in $250 million.
Kansas and Adidas...
Kansas was, obviously, one of the schools involved
in our trial who was allegedly a victim of getting
really good players from Adidas,
who was giving them $191 million.
Michigan and Nike, they're at $173 million.
And then you have Louisville.
Adidas gave Louisville $160 million,
and we allegedly defrauded them with Adidas
out of a scholarship valued-- I don't know--a couple--
I mean, a hundred grand or so.
So that's the crime that we committed.
- Louisville takes $165 million from Adidas
and then pretends they don't work for Adidas.
Someone gives you $165 million, you work for them.
That's how it is.
You know, you can't possibly be the victim
of someone giving you $165 million
and great basketball players for your team.
[foreboding music]
- Second trial was derivative of pretty much just bribery.
Everything derived out of the bribery
of Christian giving coaches money.
And the whole real premise of that second case
was that by doing so, the schools were victimized
by Christian and the coaches for fraud, basically,
that the schools were harmed as a result of that
interaction between Christian and the coaches.
Our defense was a lot of what the government
said happened did not happen,
and we believed we had evidence of that.
♪ ♪
Chronologically, we have these phone calls.
We started seeing a different picture
that wasn't necessarily being portrayed by the government.
And I call Christian up, and I'm saying,
"Dude, is-- am I hearing this right?
"You literally told the FBI agent,
"who you didn't know was an FBI agent,
"that you wanted to take the money
and not give it to the coaches, but go get some hookers"?
"I know. I--I shouldn't have said that."
I said, "It's good you said that."
Because we felt that if that played out in open court,
we had the potential of embarrassment.
And one thing we knew about
the Southern District of New York,
they don't like embarrassing.
[dramatic music]
- When you looked at it, you said,
"We're--we have the wrong guys on trial."
Marty Blazer is a person who stole money
testifying against two guys who gave people money.
We sat there and watched Marty Blazer testify.
I believe it took half a day to go through
all of the various crimes, schemes, and lies
that Marty Blazer was involved with.
- Marty Blazer's testimony was four days long.
It was a whole week of nothing but,
"I wore recordings. This is what Christian did."
It was nothing but Marty Blazer
doing everything he possibly could
to show the government that he substantially complied,
right, as part of his cooperation agreement--
that's the language in it--
and for that substantial compliance and assistance
in seeing Christian Dawkins convicted and prosecuted,
that he then could avoid going to prison.
I mean, is that a fair system? I would say probably not.
- Marty Blazer should-- yeah, he should--
probably should go to prison.
He should probably go.
He's stealing that much money to do a movie,
and it was a shit movie on top of that?
That-- you should go to prison, bro.
Marty Blazer's an idiot.
- The biggest surprise for me
was finding the conduct of the FBI.
- I found out that the FBI agents
were accused of-- or alleged to have stole money
from the investigation
via the "The Wall Street Journal" article.
- Somebody involved
gave me kind of a nudge to look into,
you know, something had happened in Las Vegas.
I was told to pay attention to some court filings
that were coming out that would
make it clear that there had been some FBI misconduct.
In the middle of this investigation--
it's a heated investigation-- shortly after,
they're all in Las Vegas doing these meetings with coaches.
This one undercover just sort of was like,
"I have to go away for a month."
♪ ♪
You know, you can't always read too much
into things like that, but when UC-1 disappears,
and they even go out of their way to
say that this person left in the middle,
it was sort of bizarre.
You know, I'm able to contact people in law enforcement,
and we reported that this one FBI agent,
Jeff D'Angelo, who's UC-1 in the complaint,
had been caught misappropriating
government money in-- on his trip to Las Vegas.
It later emerged in the court hearing that there were
more than one FBI agents who got in trouble for this.
Apparently, what happens when you send
a bunch of dudes to Las Vegas
with envelopes of cash is, like, not great.
And since then, there's been a full-blown
DOJ investigation into what went wrong with this.
♪ ♪
In the broader scheme of things, it just--
it sort of casts...
a shadow on the investigation.
I mean, who are the good guys here, you know?
- The reason why nobody knows what Jeff D'Angelo
and the other members of the investigative team did
was because it was covered up, it was--
I mean, we knew that something happened,
but we don't know what happened,
we don't know how it happened,
we don't know how much happened.
We don't have any details
besides the fact that something happened.
- Did the jury ever find out that the FBI
was misusing or stealing
government funds, taxpayer dollars?
They didn't.
- No FBI agent spoke at trial
or were even mentioned in front of the jury,
as far as I remember.
- The jury in either trial
never was aware of any alleged misconduct
by any of the FBI agents.
- I subpoenaed four FBI agents,
the four that were most principally involved
in the case, and all subpoenas were denied.
If Jeff D'Angelo walked through here right now,
I wouldn't even know if it was a FBI agent
or a sound guy.
We had no idea who Jeff D'Angelo was.
Never saw him before. Don't know his real name.
To this day, we don't know who he is.
- I don't know any investigation
where the investigation leader
is not there to take the witness stand.
- He was the primary investigative officer.
He wasn't some guy hiding in a bush with a microphone.
This was the guy that was on the yacht
giving Christian Dawkins the money
to go out and start LOYD Management,
so he was the central character
of this entire investigation,
was this particular FBI agent,
and he never came in the courtroom to testify.
- They had to believe that Marty Blazer,
a known fraudster at this point,
was more credible for the jury
than their lead FBI agent, Jeff D'Angelo.
I would feel like it's just fair
that if someone is in charge of leading an investigation
and there's been alleged misconduct,
that we should know what they did,
whether that was a small thing or a huge thing.
Like, it shouldn't be a situation where it's like,
"Fuck off, you don't need to know."
By definition, if some-- if no one knows,
someone's preventing that information
from being out there.
That's literally what a cover-up is.
I mean, it has to-- something's being covered up.
There's no-- I don't know what happened,
and I was in the fucking case.
- You know, that's the basic thing.
We are, the taxpayers, you know, paid for everything.
The yacht, all the alcohol--
God knows what gambling
they were doing out in Las Vegas.
Hotel suites in Las Vegas.
$4,000, $5,000-a-night suite.
It was just-- it's mind-boggling to imagine
that the taxpayers in America
foot the bill for something this ridiculous.
The whole thing was manufactured, right?
The whole thing was arguably entrapment, right?
There's a point in time where Christian made it clear
he didn't want to do what he was being asked to do,
which is what he was charged with.
♪ ♪
Christian Dawkins doesn't have the name recognition,
the resources,
the, quite frankly, the money
to scare the DOJ.
But if you charge these major head coaches who have--
who are making $3, $4, $5 million a year
and they're all gonna fight this shit,
and you have improper things going on
with your investigative team,
you probably can't fucking keep that hidden.
- I subpoenaed Sean Miller, the head coach of Arizona.
I subpoenaed Will Wade,
the head coach of Louisiana State University.
You know, I wonder what would've happened
had those folks testified.
I think our case would've been a little stronger.
- All of college sports fans wanted to see Rick Pitino
on the stand or Sean Miller on the stand
or Will Wade on the stand.
That's not how it worked, and those guys didn't have--
they weren't charged with any crimes.
They weren't--
they weren't accused of any wrongdoing.
- Lack of evidence was not the reason
that coaches were not charged.
♪ ♪
When Sean Miller had his press conference,
I literally thought of Book, and I was like, shit,
I mean, Sean should have his own, like,
movie agent or some shit, or a manager.
Like, he should be an actor.
That was a really high-level--
I was convinced, honestly.
- Contrary to what has been written this past week,
we do our very best to run a clean program
at the University of Arizona.
I have never knowingly violated NCAA rules
while serving as head coach of this great program.
I have never paid a recruit or prospect or their family
or representative to come to Arizona.
I never have and I never will.
I have never arranged or directed payment
or any improper benefits to a recruit or prospect
or their family or representative,
and I never will.
- If you want to know my opinion,
when Sean Miller had his press conference
and said has a player from Arizona ever received money
or did he know anything about a player from Arizona
receiving money, did he lie?
Yeah, that wasn't true.
♪ ♪
- Book and I are just essentially speaking about
myself wanting to recruit Deandre Ayton.
Obviously, he was already on campus.
Book was one of his coaches.
They have access to him every day,
so I had had conversations with Book about Deandre
and just, you know, myself getting in front of him,
hopefully having a shot at representing him one day.
I'm being told
that Sean is the one
who is financing the Deandre situation.
- I mean, did Sean Miller pay players?
I think, you know, if you can't believe
the head assistant coach on a wiretap,
who doesn't know he's being recorded,
in his truest of moments, talking with his buddy,
and he's saying that Sean Miller's paying players,
you'd have to be a really, really die-hard Arizona fan...
[laughing] To believe that he's not.
- If anyone's gonna say Book is a cheater
and Book was a liar and Book paid players,
then there's no way you can separate Sean from it.
- I could care less if these guys are paying players.
I don't have anything personal against Sean Miller
or Will Wade, I don't know these guys,
but I think that Christian's relationship with them
was very clear from those wiretap phone calls
by the way that they're having conversation with each other.
All right? Not very formal.
- They do have wiretaps of head coaches talking
about recruiting, and we never heard any of them.
The government fought every attempt by defense attorneys
in both trials to get those calls
admitted and played in court.
They never came out.
- You know, the government knew those calls existed.
They heard what were on those phone calls.
The judge felt it was not relevant
to the issues before the court.
- So the names that you know,
fans know, we didn't hear from them.
- Very comfortable with each other.
They had worked together on a lot of different things.
- The player in that particular situation
was Nassir Little.
Sean wanted Nassir really badly.
He knew I had a relationship
with the grassroots coaches, who at that time,
I think we all were under the impression
that they kind of had the juice with the situation.
I basically told him
that I think it's gonna come down to Miami and Arizona,
and what I think needed to happen
for the kid to come to Arizona.
- Yeah, it was no question,
that conversation, all about money, I think.
I mean, from my interpretation--
maybe Sean, you know, speaks a different language than me,
but I'm pretty sure that we can all agree that that's--
we was talking about what needed to happen to get it done.
- I--or we, have never, ever done business
of any kind with Christian Dawkins.
- [laughing]
- I think the only way you can interpret someone
in a head coaching position
saying they made a strong-ass offer--
they ain't talking about a scholarship offer, bro.
100% talking about money.
Just the audacity-- I mean, just--
you gotta take your hat off to him, man.
He not only didn't get charged for anything,
not only did the government have all this--
this information and evidence,
and nothing was happening on a criminal level,
he also basically just said fuck you to the NCAA
and to the university he worked for.
- Head Coach Will Wade has requested reinstatement
from his indefinite suspension
while still refusing to meet with the school.
- Man, that was some G shit.
And he said fuck you to the people
who wasn't with him.
And he still got to keep his job
and make millions of dollars.
It's, like, the perfect storm. This is the life.
Fucking, they're paying him a lot of money
to win games, bro.
The fuck is he supposed to do, lose?
Will Wade is definitely a fucking gangster
for what he did.
There's no fucking way I'm gonna believe
that people at that level of sophistication
is gonna get on national TV
knowing that there's a smoking gun laying out there
and be so confident in saying,
"I don't know shit. I didn't do shit.
I don't know anybody involved."
There had to be somebody to give them
some level of insurances.
They wouldn't roll the dice like that.
No one fucks with the FBI like that.
No one's that crazy.
- And this now completes my statement on this matter.
- From the start of this whole case,
the whole idea was to bring in coaches,
and they could have blown the whole fucking thing up
if they wanted to, and they didn't,
because, you know, the right people
got to the right people and it was stopped.
- The original point was, it was gonna change everything,
and they just backed away.
They didn't do it. It just never happened.
They had the opportunity.
They had the resources. They had the power.
They said they wanted to do it.
They didn't do it. I don't know why.
- I can't...fathom
that I'm the person
that all these fucking resources went into catching.
I got sentenced to 12 months and a day.
Out of everybody who was arrested
and was involved in the investigation,
I got the longest prison sentence.
Total sentence I had for both cases is 18 months.
Federal prison.
Book Richardson got three months.
Tony Bland got no time. Probation.
Merl Code got nine months total.
Jim Gatto got nine months total.
Munish Sood didn't even get fucking probation.
I think he just got a fine.
I don't know what Marty got.
He better get at least ten years.
- Christian Dawkins refused to cooperate in any way.
He fought both cases to the end.
I think the feds thought everyone would plea,
there wouldn't be any trials, but these guys said nah,
I'm gonna stand up, I'm gonna argue my case,
and they all lost, but they made no agreements,
no cooperation with the government,
and they went down swinging.
- I think he wanted to go down with his place in history
as a guy that had an opportunity
really to throw the world under the bus
in college basketball, in the community,
and he chose not to.
- We've had cheating in this game forever.
Players have been paid forever. Was that confirmed here? Yes.
But did the Southern District of New York
and the FBI deliver when they said,
"We have your playbook,"
and they made all these threats, no.
I think it was actually a pretty stern rebuke
of the Southern District of New York
that they only got convictions in three of the ten charges
that they brought against Merl Code and Christian Dawkins.
- And I want to be very clear with this.
Any coach who offers to pay a player,
in my opinion, is a good guy.
I don't see anything wrong with it.
I think the players-- the coaches
who are not willing to help out their players
are not good people.
The way the system is set up,
it's kind of caused someone to have to step in
to provide what the families and the players need.
- Let's say Google, Amazon, says,
"We want to identify the top STEM students,
the top coders in high schools,"
and they find one in Saginaw,
and they go in there and they say,
"We're gonna pay you $20,000
"and you're gonna come intern for us in the summer,
"and then maybe when you get out of college,
you come work for us instead of the competition."
They would write that up in the newspaper.
They would put that on TV.
It would be an outreach program.
It would be a way to inspire young students.
It would be tremendous.
What's the difference?
If Google and Amazon say,
"That kid's worth 20 grand to us.
Come out here for the summer."
In fact, if they said, "You need to come out here
for the summer and we don't pay you,"
you'd say that's absolutely terrible.
But because of amateurism,
and because an entire industry has made billions
off of the concept of, "you have to do this for free,"
no one's telling that kid,
"You need to code for the love of coding."
No one's saying, "You should go work for Google
for the love of Google."
What is the difference?
There's none, except they have sold
this concept of amateurism to America,
and then they sold a lot of commercials
during the NCAA basketball tournament around it.
- This is a business. This is not amateur athletics.
There's nothing amateur
that makes billions of dollars.
The NCAA brings in every year a billion dollars
just in television licensing for college basketball.
And so you have a multibillion-dollar
licensing business and none of these people
are paying any taxes on the money.
The NCAA is a nonprofit that pays no taxes.
The conferences are nonprofits.
They pay no taxes.
- You can cry victim, right,
and pretend you're a victim and then keep getting paid
and just keep the system the same.
It's perfect.
- Here's the reason why I'm different from the NCAA.
Yes, I made money.
So did the people with me.
So did the players.
I never took anything from them.
The NCAA acts as if
they are bigger than the athlete.
If the athletes were all white
and the coaches and athletic directors were all black,
there's no way this would be happening.
♪ ♪
- College athletics is a lot of fun,
and it brings communities together.
It does a lot of great things.
But it would continue to be a good deal
if you allowed the players to operate in the free market.
Instead, we create a system that punishes the kids
because nothing's on the up and up.
It all has to be clandestine.
If you have great players,
you are in possession of lottery tickets
that are going to cash,
and so the guys are gonna come for them.
The agents are gonna come, the shoe reps,
I mean, it just-- they're already there.
They're not coming for them, they were already there.
- I knew every player in the world,
every level, every person,
every coach, every everything.
It was addictive, I was-- I loved--
my whole life was basketball.
I had never made a dollar off of anything in my life
besides basketball until recently.
♪ ♪
I was literally thinking, okay, what am I gonna do next?
And the music business is one business where if--
I was thinking at the time,
if I was to be a convicted felon,
that wouldn't be a detriment in music, basically.
- During the first trial, the day of the convictions,
you know, when those guilty verdicts came back,
this was Christian.
He wiped my face, and he was like,
"Dad, let's get the hell out of here,
"'cause I have a meeting at 6:00 p.m.
"with Atlantic Records,
with the CEO of Atlantic Records."
I...
"Chris, shut up." - [laughs]
- I'll never forget it, I mean, it'll be...
one of those moments, I'll be on my death bed
and I'll remember, while all this was going on,
while Christian is literally-- his future
is on the line, potentially going to prison,
the whole time, he's taking an Uber
to midtown, negotiating a deal
with Atlantic Records, and I had no idea.
- If I'm passionate about something,
I can laser in, and I don't care
what's in front of me or how it's gonna happen,
I'll get it done.
I wanted to do my own label,
and it kind of went quickly
from the standpoint of finding artists,
managing them,
and getting into the right rooms
and just being blessed enough and fortunate enough
to land a deal of that magnitude
with the number one record company in the world.
We have a joint venture deal with Atlantic Records.
The name of the record company
that we created is called Chosen.
I'm the CEO of Chosen.
- It's hard to get a record deal.
Atlantic Records gave Christian his own business,
a record label.
When you think about that,
it seems almost impossible or unbelievable.
- And it was just like, at that point,
nothing seemed real anymore. [chuckles]
- It is reality.
I've got the money, so it's reality now.
Listen, I think I can do anything, so...
Maybe that's the gift I have.
I'm so naive
of what I am not supposed to be able to do
that it's a blessing,
because I'm just like, why can't I do it?
Why can't I start a label?
I didn't see anything crazy about it.
I thought that, hey, just gotta go try and get it,
and not fucking hiring FBI agents to work with me.
- This is a letter to the family
when he was trying to get out of going to school, to college.
This is dated August 8th, 2012,
and the subject is, "The Final Verdict."
It starts off, "I'm great.
I have a special gift from God."
He's so crazy.
"I know this to be factual information.
"It is rare for someone to be as advanced as me at my age.
"I have a gift that truly great ones have.
"I am in a class of people like Gandhi, Barack Obama,
"Jay-Z, Martin Luther King,
"Tiger Woods, Dick Clark, Michael Jackson,
"Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, etc.
"Revolutionary people in their fields.
I'm gonna chase my dreams 24-7 every day."
He's so insane. [laughs]
"And leave a impact on the world."
♪ ♪
"I've had some success.
"A kid not even 20 was responsible
"for signing two pros.
"That's never happened before.
"Another record I broke-- the first being
"the youngest person ever to get a shoe deal.
"Maybe I don't have too much to show for it,
"but I will one day.
"To be clear, this is what I plan to do.
"My focus is gonna be building my management company,
"LOYD Management Company,
"into a sports and entertainment empire.
"I have had some success, and every day,
"I'm going to continue to keep trying
"to grow my business and make it happen.
"Relationships are everything in my business.
"Every day, I will strengthen the ones I have
and cultivate new ones."
[voice breaking] This is so...
It's crazy how all of this is coming together.
"At the end of the day, just give me a year.
"If things don't go as planned, I'll maybe do things
"in a more traditional way.
"Well, no, I won't.
"I'll just try harder and grind it out
"for another year.
One day, it will happen."
♪ ♪
"Success isn't..." [sniffs]
Can you read it right here?
"Success isn't..."
- "Success isn't an option for me.
"That's why I always say I'm rich,
"'cause one day, I will be,
"and I'm preparing for that lifestyle now
"while I'm poor.
"I hope you guys understand.
"I love you.
You're the..."
- "Effin' best." - "Effin' best."
♪ ♪
- Did I do anything wrong?
Yes and no.
I think...
I mean, we clearly weren't following any rules.
Were any of the defendants in the cases,
you know, waking up to defraud people?
No.
I still can't believe that the FBI
went through all of this
just to stop someone from getting paid
what they're supposed to get paid.
It's like, it just doesn't make common sense to me.
If they think this basketball shit is bad,
imagine how much money football players can get.
- The moral of the story is, fuck the NCAA.
How was that?
Good.
[laughs]
[epic music]
♪ ♪
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