[ad_1]
OOn September 26, 2018, 10 prominent US college athletes were arrested in connection with a federal fraud and corruption investigation. Specifically, the government alleges that business executives and financial advisers bribed basketball coaches to secure business with NBA-affiliated players and that a senior Adidas executive conspired with them to direct payments to high school students and their families in return of their commitment to Adidas-sponsored college athletic programs.
The scandal — which ensnared top NBA draft pick Deandre Ayton, Hall of Fame coach Rick Pitino and Kobe Baker, associate athletic director at Alabama, one of the nation’s biggest talent factories — was a black eye for the NCAA, the key cops who style themselves as virtuous defenders of amateurism in college sports while reaping billions from the backs of student-athletes, most of them black and economically disadvantaged. The extent of the scheme was not fully understood until one of the conspirators, a middle-aged banker named Marty Blazer, was turned into an FBI informant. “There’s a saying in law enforcement that you’re ‘half cop,'” says true crime author Guy Lawson, “when you’re a criminal but you start thinking cops are cool. Marty became a motivated contributor. He became an inventor.”
Lawson’s latest non-fiction book, Hot Dog Money, is Blazer’s story of the Good Guys—told largely from Lawson’s personal interviews with Blazer, Blazer’s journal entries from the time, and more than two years of Lawson digging in the troughs with legal documents. Instead of providing another solution for the Blazers, Hot Dog Money cross-examines the underdog culture that created it and still makes college sports the greatest American spectacle it is.
The book’s title comes from Blazer’s term for the financial services he traded for his own ends until his conviction on multiple federal fraud charges forced his government to cooperate. In the sports press, Blazer was likened to Pacino’s Frank Serpico, the renegade cop who brought down his vicious institution. In truth, Lawson found Blazer closer to Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill—a wise man who would still be living a high-spirited life if the music never stopped. Lawson—who also wrote The Brotherhoods (about two cops who worked for the mob) and War Dogs (about the Miami stoner gunrunners who inspired the Jonah Hill and Miles Teller-starrer)—is such a reliable storyteller. , however. “I didn’t go to school in America,” he says. “I grew up in Canada, Australia and England. I watch American sports the way you might watch Formula 1.
As Lawson puts it, Blazer didn’t set out to become the shadowy archetype best known to college sports fans as “the man with the bag.” He was a mid-level financial advisor making six-figure deals in stocks and bonds with a client list that slowly grew to include select members of the NFL’s Pittsburgh Steelers. The story of William “Tank” Black, the powerful football agent accused of running a cocaine-fueled Ponzi scheme in Detroit, ignited Blazer’s larger ambitions.
The Blazers teamed up with an agent and recruited football players from Pennsylvania colleges with the goal of committing to future pros. This is where “hot dog money” came into play. Blazer wasn’t just passing envelopes full of money under the table. He sent money home to the players’ struggling families, provided them with luxury cars, paid for extravagant trips to Miami and Las Vegas and competed with their inevitable binges at the strip clubs. Sometimes he arranged for girls to be flown in for parties closer to campus. “Girls are trafficked, children are trafficked,” Lawson says. “Forget morality, how do you even describe the decency of it all? This is what a flush toilet roll looks like.’
In a typical hot dog money scheme, a college player receives money in the form of a forgiving loan with the understanding that the services of the bag will be retained after the player turns pro; depending on the player, the bagman can make his money back many times over through tedious management fees. A proudly devoted husband and father of three, Blazer was more interested in helping his clients get the most out of a corrupt system and went the extra mile to look after them, paying for information that could help clients prevent potential disaster. In one memorable case, he saved a player from marrying a stripper-prostitute who had been lured by her pimp into an extortion plot. “Protecting my players from vultures and hangers-on was incredibly satisfying,” Blazer says on Hot Dog Money. “It felt good, intellectually.” However: Everything he did was against NCAA rules.
And while his capture by the Securities and Exchange Commission was what ultimately forced Blazer to become a confidential government whistleblower, his willingness to cooperate came from a righteous impulse to reform a morally bankrupt industry that, as Lawson says, “was created to deceive and exploit”. Even with experience, some children are no less wise in cunning. Last month, Glenn “Big Baby” Davis, a college star who played in the NBA from 2007 to 2015, was sentenced to 40 months in prison after being convicted in federal court of participating in a scheme to defraud the U.S. health benefit plan. the league. Davis, who maintains his innocence (although he says he was advised not to testify in court), claims he was taken advantage of by the very people he trusted would do right by him. “We’re already fighting six feet deep from where we came from,” Davis said in an interview with the higher education podcast. “It’s crazy for me to say I’m going to jail for the injuries and things I’ve been through.”
On May 23, another date that will remain in college sports, the NCAA announced it will allow schools to pay players directly — a departure from more than 100 years of bungling that comes as a result of a multibillion-dollar settlement agreement in three pending federal antitrust cases. “It’s like a thief saying, ‘I’ll only steal 80% from you,'” says Lawson, further horrified by the institutional dedication to keeping players financially illiterate. The settlement, he adds, simply buys the NCAA more time to avoid questions about why it isn’t using its billions to do more for student-athletes on monetary issues. “The Alabama associate athletic director who got involved in this case of taking money from Marty,” Lawson says, referring to Kobe Baker, “one of his job descriptions was to teach many, many future pro athletes at Alabama how to avoid bad business entanglements. The NBA has this financial literacy program they run for rookies. This is equivalent to sending a child to the workplace by giving him an afternoon at kindergarten.
Alas, just like with Henry Hill, Blazer doesn’t get the ending he expected. Although his cooperation with law enforcement led to prison terms for an Adidas executive, two associates and four college coaches and prompted the NCAA to enter a dozen colleges, Blazer — who received a year of probation in exchange and was ordered to pay $1.6 million dollars in restitution to the customers he defrauded—comes out of the experience more disappointed than ever. Blazer’s close observations of the G-Men on the job lead him to “respect them less and less and finally see them as a bunch of buffoons,” Lawson says. Blazer found that the NCAA investigators were even worse — ignorant and overwhelmed by unscrupulous behavior within their purview.
On January 10th, Blazer died at the age of 53 – too soon to see the NCAA finally buckle under the weight of its own hypocrisy. But he certainly did enough to be remembered as better. Two days earlier, as his collaboration with Blazer was winding down, Lawson recalled Blazer feeling down about his more colorful anecdotes being left out of the final draft. It doesn’t matter if that was the point to clear it. “I told him early on, Marty, if you stick with it and really commit, the payoff down the road is that you’ll really understand your life in a better way,” Lawson recalled. “You will have taken time to sort things out and think about why you did things and didn’t. He said, “You know what? I’m glad you said that because it really happened. I really learned a lot about myself.”
[ad_2]
