Coaches with some of the country’s top college basketball programs — including former NBA star Chuck Person — were arrested Tuesday morning as part of a wide-ranging bribery and fraud probe tied to their recruitment of players, authorities said.
Person, assistant head coach at Auburn University and coaches at the University of Arizona, University of Southern California and Oklahoma State University were busted, as well as managers, financial advisers and two top reps for Adidas, the Department of Justice said.
Manhattan federal-court documents allege that the coaches received kickbacks from the agents, money advisers and clothing-giant execs for steering their players — some of the biggest former high-school basketball stars in the nation — to them for lucrative deals.
Along the way, the agents, advisers and apparel-company bigs allegedly funneled tens of thousands of dollars to the players and their families to make sure they went to the coaches’ schools.
In addition to Person — a star b-baller at Auburn before playing more than a decade in the NBA, most notably for the Indiana Pacers — the arrested coaches include: Anthony “Tony” Bland, associate head coach at University of Southern California; Lamont Evans, associate head coach and recruiting coordinator for Oklahoma State University’s basketball team, and Emmanuel Richardson, an assistant coach for University of Arizona.
Jim Gatto, director of global sports marketing for basketball at Adidas, has been named in court papers as among those rounded up and arrested.
The investigation, undertaken by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Manhattan US Attorney’s office, casts an ugly light on the highly competitive recruiting pipeline channeling elite high-school athletes through Division I college programs and into professional leagues.
It was unclear what the repercussions might be for the college athletes caught up in the scandal.
The court documents suggest that they broke NCAA rules. If that is the case, they could be deemed ineligible to play, at least for awhile.
“A student-athlete is rendered ‘ineligible’ to participate in Division I sports if the athlete is recruited by a university or any “representative of its athletics interests’’ in violation of NCAA rules,’’ the papers state.
The athletes were not identified in the documents.