Feds likely to apply pressure on big-name coaches, programs
September 28, 2017 by admin
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Some of college sports’ most high-profile athletic administrators and basketball coaches, and even players and recruits, are likely to soon face pressure unlike anything they have ever encountered as a federal corruption and fraud case that was announced Tuesday expands and continues, lawyers and former federal investigators say.
A harsh reality of such cases, said Guy Lewis, a former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, is the desire of federal investigators to determine how high up the alleged corruption and fraud go, meaning whether the malfeasance reaches into the upper echelons of athletic departments and university administrations. Investigators will determine that by applying pressure to those already charged by demanding more details, by hauling in witnesses for questioning, by issuing subpoenas and by seeking search warrants, among other tools.
“It is a fundamentally different ballgame,” Lewis said. “The federal government’s ability to investigate and turn over leads and pursue evidence in an almost unlimited way is real and dramatic.”
Louisville’s Pitino and Jurich placed on leave
An FBI investigation into fraud and corruption in college basketball has likely cost Louisville coach Rick Pitino and athletic director Tom Jurich their jobs.
Rick Pitino couldn’t talk his way out of this scandal
Trouble has followed Rick Pitino nearly from the moment he started as a coach. All along, he said it wasn’t him, pushing the blame onto someone else, sidestepping issue after issue to keep his job. That all changed Wednesday.
It would be foolish, Lewis and others said, to assume that what has been publicized so far represents an end rather than a beginning.
On Tuesday, 10 men — including a top Adidas executive and four assistant basketball coaches — were charged with using hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to influence star athletes’ choice of schools, shoe sponsors, agents and even tailors. Federal prosecutors said at least three top high school recruits were promised payments of as much as $150,000, using money supplied by Adidas, to attend two universities sponsored by the athletic shoe company.
Starting in 2015, the FBI conducted an elaborate undercover operation, using wiretaps, surveillance video, undercover agents and cooperating witnesses. The FBI was able to document coaches accepting bribes to steer their players to certain financial advisers and/or business managers. In other cases, high-ranking Adidas employees worked with others to pay prospective student-athletes’ families to ensure the players signed with Adidas-sponsored schools and then signed with Adidas once they turned pro, federal complaints allege.
FBI assistant director Bill Sweeney had a warning Tuesday for other coaches who might be involved in similar schemes. “We have your playbook,” he said. “Our investigation is ongoing. We are conducting additional interviews as we speak.” The FBI and U.S. Attorney’s office said they have established a hotline for information related to the investigation.
Unlike the NCAA’s enforcement staff and its limited investigative resources, the more powerful federal agents have subpoena power to help gather evidence and can compel witnesses to cooperate. Witnesses in most cases are not questioned under oath, but they risk prosecution if they do not tell the truth. One high-profile example of such a prosecution is former Olympic track star Marion Jones, a five-time medalist who served six months in prison after making false statements to federal agents who inquired about her use of performance-enhancing drugs and her connection to a check-fraud case. Businesswoman Martha Stewart also served time for lying to federal agents about a stock sale.
“This is a dramatic difference in terms of the investigators’ ability to demand and require evidence, to employ a federal grand jury, to require witnesses to appear,” said Lewis, who now represents defendants facing federal charges.
For decades, the funneling of money and perks to elite players has been the college game’s dirty little secret, but rarely have coaches and programs been caught. The NCAA enforcement staff, at times, has been woefully understaffed, often with young, inexperienced hires, and charged with investigating the very schools that pay their salaries.
For some, such as former Nike and Adidas executive Sonny Vaccaro, the NCAA enforcement staff has “always been a myth” in that it zeroes in on easy targets and never digs beneath the surface. The NCAA investigative and sanctioning process can drag on for years. The coaches overseeing the programs — particular in recent years with the likes of Jim Boeheim at Syracuse, Roy Williams at North Carolina and Rick Pitino at Louisville — have routinely kept their jobs and rank among the coaching Hall of Famers.
In the wake of the Tuesday’s announcement, however, Pitino was effectively fired when he was placed on unpaid university leave. Louisville placed athletic director Tom Jurich on paid administrative leave.
“Obviously, the government has substantially more resources to get at bank records and things like that,” a former NCAA enforcement representative said. “I would expect they will be able to accomplish a lot more than what you would under a typical NCAA investigation, in terms of really getting to the root of things.
“The NCAA doesn’t have subpoena power, but if you have a coach involved, they can make a request of the coach to produce his bank records. The coach basically has to do it, or he is going to be charged with failure to cooperate. That is the coach. They can’t get to some of these other entities like Adidas and some of those other people. The government is going to be able to build a much stronger case. And it looks like they probably already have.”
Lewis, a Miami-based attorney, said he would expect the government to gain the cooperation of potential witnesses — including players and their parents, AAU and college coaches, financial advisers and shoe company officials — while expanding the case. His experience is that publicity from a case often results in witnesses, documents and evidence coming forward. Likewise, a university’s leadership has a foremost responsibility to protect the institution’s integrity rather than stand by an assistant or head coach in such a circumstance.
“And if that means a lower and even the upper echelon of leadership has to be sacrificed for the greater good, you have seen it. It happens over and over,” Lewis said.
Joon H. Kim, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, made it clear Tuesday that his office is pursuing additional indictments in the pay-for-play scandal.
“It’s better for you to call us than for us to be calling you when we’re ready to charge you,” Kim warned.
“There are no real limits or bounds in terms of the next step,” said Lewis, who has experience as a defense attorney in sports-related cases as well as having successfully prosecuted a federal case against the late Panamanian leader Gen. Manuel Noriega. “… When I knock on your door and produce a badge, and it says ‘Department of Justice’ or ‘Internal Revenue’ or ‘DEA’ or ‘FBI,’ and I give you a subpoena that calls for any and all documents related to a transaction, it is a dramatic event. I can compel your testimony.”
A witness can try to plead the Fifth Amendment and not speak to authorities in an attempt to avoid self-incrimination, but even that might not end the pressure, Lewis said, because a prosecutor might grant the witness immunity from prosecution so long as he or she talks. That includes recruits, players and their parents, potentially.
“At a minimum, they become material witnesses,” Lewis said.
“I want the top of the pyramid,” Lewis said of such investigations. “I don’t want the guy that is at the bottom of the pyramid. I want the guy who is at the top, who is calling the shots. I want to follow the money and the decision-making authority. And I can compel your testimony. You are now going to become a witness for the government. If you say no? OK, fine. Let’s start with 30 days in jail for contempt and see if that jogs your memory.”
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Tokyo Governor Sees Boost as Abe Dissolves Japan Parliament
September 28, 2017 by admin
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Japan’s opposition forces appeared set to consolidate around Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike, whose new political group narrowed a gap in opinion polls with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s ruling party weeks ahead of a general election.
Shinzo Abe on Sept. 28.
Abe dissolved parliament on Thursday for an election expected on Oct. 22. The Democratic Party, which has been one of Japan’s top political groups for the past two decades, may decide later in the day whether to merge with the party Koike launched this week, Kyodo news and other domestic media reported.
“We cannot entrust the safety of Japan and the future of our children to a party that changes its banner just for the sake of an election,” Abe told party members in comments broadcast by NHK.
In a survey conducted by the Mainichi newspaper Sept. 26-27, 18 percent of respondents said they would vote for Koike’s Party of Hope in the proportional representation section of the election, placing it second behind Abe’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party on 29 percent. A poll published in the Nikkei newspaper on Monday saw Abe’s party leading both Koike’s group and the Democrats by a five-to-one margin.
Abe ‘Vulnerable’
“The LDP is vulnerable as the Tokyo governor takes her policies nationwide to form a strong opposition,” Amir Anvarzadeh, head of Japanese equity sales at BGC Partners Inc. in Singapore, said in a note to clients. He added that Abe could even be facing a similar fate to that of UK Prime Minister Theresa May, who lost her parliamentary majority in a snap election in June.
Abe is looking to capitalize on a boost in his approval ratings after North Korea fired missiles over Japan, which diverted attention from cronyism scandals that had dented his popularity. Koike’s rise threatens to make the vote much closer than previously thought, potentially strengthening calls for his replacement in a ruling-party leadership contest next year even if the LDP wins the election.
Financial markets have shown little sign of concern about any political shift in Japan. The Topix index of Japanese shares is close to the two-year high hit Monday amid optimism that the Abenomics program that has brought massive injections of liquidity along with investor-friendly corporate governance reforms, will continue for another four years.
Abe has been in power since 2012, and could become the longest-serving prime minister in Japanese history if he wins the general election and the party leadership vote next year. The LDP has ruled Japan for all but a handful of years since the 1950s.
Party Rebel
Abe said Monday that he wanted to test public opinion on his plan to divert some revenue from an upcoming sales tax hike to reduce education costs for working families, putting off a target for improving the fiscal balance. He said he would remain in office if his ruling coalition achieves a simple majority of the 465 seats up for grabs.
Yuriko Koike
Koike is a former newscaster who later joined Abe’s party, serving stints as environment and defense minister. In 2008 she ran unsuccessfully for leadership of the LDP, which would’ve made her prime minister.
She has fought her party’s establishment since it declined to back her in the governor’s race last year, which she won. Afterward she officially left the LDP and formed a new party — Tokyo Residents First — that crushed Abe’s party in Tokyo’s assembly elections in July.
Koike’s new national party wants to delay the sales tax hike because of economic risks, and will also aim to phase out nuclear power — a source of widespread unease in Japan since the 2011 Fukushima disaster. By contrast, Abe’s LDP plans to restart nuclear reactors, aiming to have atomic power make up as much as 22 percent of the nation’s electricity supply mix by 2030.
Nuclear Industry
Shares in Kansai Electric Power Co, the Japanese utility most dependent on nuclear power before the disaster, tumbled the most in eight months on Thursday as Koike’s party gained steam. A big win for her could impact the nation’s nuclear regulator and restarting reactors, according to Tom O’Sullivan, founder of Tokyo-based energy consultant Mathyos.
The ruling coalition controls about 68 percent of seats in the 475-member lower house of the national parliament, including 287 for the LDP and its allies and 35 for Komeito, according to the parliamentary website. The Democrats hold 87 seats in conjunction with the Club of Independents.
The Democrats were set to meet later Thursday. Kyodo News reported that leader Seiji Maehara would announce that the party won’t run candidates in the election and will encourage members to run for Koike’s Party of Hope.
The total number of seats is set to be cut to 465 in the next election as part of a reform aimed at reducing the excessive weight given to rural votes.
A separate poll published by the Asahi newspaper Thursday found support for Abe’s cabinet down two percentage points at 36 percent. Thirteen percent of respondents said they would vote for the Party of Hope, compared with 32 percent for the LDP.
— With assistance by Takashi Hirokawa, Chris Anstey, Stephen Stapczynski, and Anna Kitanaka