Co-defendant Christian Dawkins testified Thursday he didn’t think it was a crime to pay players during the college basketball corruption case.
“You can’t defraud a school,’’ he said. “I don’t even know how that’s possible . . . It’s ridiculous,’’ he said.
Dawkins also suggested he didn’t think it was a smart investment to pay assistant coaches to bribe players to become clients of his fledgling sports marketing company, claiming he was pressured to do so by Jeff D’Angelo, the pseudonym for an FBI undercover agent posing as an investor.
“It’s just wasting money,’’ he claimed. “It was stupid.’’
But federal prosecutor Robert Boone painted a radically different picture of the 26-year old Dawkins as a hustler and con artist and had previously been accused of charging $42,000 in Uber costs to an NBA player’s credit card, which caused the NBA Players Association to send a letter about Dawkins to its members and agents.
Dawkins, who was working as a runner for agent Andy Miller at the time, previously testified several people at ASM Sports were using his Uber account and the player was reimbursed.
Then, prosecutors played a surveillance tape in March 2016 when Dawkins traveled from Atlanta to Columbia, S.C. with alleged co-conspirator Munish Sood and disgraced former financial planner Marty Blazer, who both have since become cooperating witnesses for the government, to meet with then-South Carolina assistant Lamont Evans about future NBA player PJ Dozier.
During the recording, Dawkins says, “You need to be in bed with somebody like that so you can have complete access to the kid.
Prosecutors also played audio recording from June 6, 2017, meeting on a yacht in Battery Park where Dawkins, Sood and D’Angelo signed an agreement to launch their new company in which they talked about setting up meetings with assistant coaches in during a travel team tournament in Vegas to implement plans to steer players to their agency in exchange for cash.
Last October, Dawkins was among three men convicted of federal criminal charges related to a pay for play scheme to steer recruits to Adidas sponsored programs like Kansas, Louisville and NC State.
Closing arguments in the case start Friday and will wrap up Monday when the case will go to the jury.
