College Hoops Prosecutor Defends DOJ Bribery Probe’s Legacy
In late January, Duke men’s basketball eked out a seven-point victory at Wake Forest. Watching from the crowd of 13,169 at LJVM Coliseum in Winston-Salem, N.C., was Robert Boone, a former Division I soccer player at Howard University who now works as a white-collar lawyer for WilmerHale in New York City.
A college sports fan, there was no notable reason for Boone to be at the game—but his presence stood out. Before transitioning to private practice, Boone worked as an assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, where he served as one of the key lawyers behind the federal government’s effort to criminally prosecute NCAA athlete bribery.
Originally hailed as a game-changer seven and a half years ago, the college basketball corruption probe is now widely regarded as a case of prosecutorial overreach that fell short of its hype.
“I totally get the perception that it was going to be something bigger, and it wasn’t,” Boone told Sportico last fall at a Manhattan coffee shop near his office. “And I don’t think that’s necessarily an unfair read.”
In the course of that conversation—and in a follow-up phone interview earlier this month—Boone reflected on the government’s efforts to confront college sports’ underground economy and all the reforms to that economy that have taken place since. While he acknowledges the criticism of those efforts, Boone maintains that the investigation was a necessary first step that, despite its shortcomings, helped spur many of the NCAA reforms that followed.
“Maybe I’m biased,” Boone said, “but I think the involvement of federal authorities was a bigger shock to the system than any previous attempts at reform. Combined with the timing and the growing money in college sports, it was reaching a tipping point that ultimately pushed the issue over the edge.”
This year’s March Madness seems to offer a compelling closing argument for detractors of the Department of Justice operation that carried the high-flown codename “Ballerz.”
Rick Pitino, who was ousted from Louisville amid the scandal, is now the head coach at St. John’s University, where he has led the No. 6-ranked Red Storm to their highest heights in a quarter-century. Auburn’s Bruce Pearl, whose program was also at the center of Ballerz, currently leads a Tigers program ranked No. 3 in the nation. Alabama, which was implicated in the investigation, is currently No. 5. And Creighton and Arizona, while currently unranked, are well-positioned to make the NCAA men’s basketball tourney with at-large bids.
Beyond specific schools and individuals, the entire landscape of college sports has been turned on its head. Players can now hire agents and get paid for their NIL—wink, wink—and, come next academic year, many Division I college basketball players are expected to receive revenue-sharing payments directly from their schools.
The 10 individuals initially arrested in September 2017, which included four college assistant coaches, were all relative bit players in the ecosystem. Although the feds suggested there was more to come, no others were ever charged. That’s if you’re not including one of the FBI’s lead case agents in the probe, who would later plead guilty to gambling away thousands of dollars of the government’s money that was supposed to be used for a “Ballerz”-related sting.
From the outset, prosecutors faced skepticism from the public and media, who questioned why law enforcement appeared to be taking on the role of the NCAA’s enforcement arm.
“Normally, when these cases and the evidence are announced, [prosecutors] get the benefit of the doubt from the media, for better or for worse,” Boone said.
He laments that the distinction between two separate alleged fraud schemes—one involving charges against individuals who bribed players to attend specific schools, and the other concerning bribes paid to coaches to direct players toward certain agents—was blurred into a single pay-to-play conspiracy in the public’s eye.
Boone attributes this confusion to media coverage and the legal tactics employed by the defense attorneys. Yet the government itself framed it as a unified web of corruption when it first announced the indictments over 7 1/2 years ago.
“The picture painted by these charges is anything but pretty,” Joon Kim, the acting U.S. Attorney, said at the time. “Coaches at some of the sport’s most prestigious programs soliciting and accepting cash bribes. Managers and financial advisors preying on top-tier prospects like vultures. And employees from one of the largest sportswear companies secretly funneling money to high school recruits.”
To Kim’s right, two easels displayed posters illustrating the flow of money in the alleged bribery and fraud schemes. Beside them was Boone, the former Howard soccer player, standing sentinel along with the other assistant U.S. attorneys handling the cases.
The press conference took place during the first week of official practice for the 2017-18 college basketball season—one year after the Supreme Court upheld the ruling in O’Bannon v. NCAA and two years before California passed its groundbreaking NIL law. Watching the event today feels like tuning into Turner Classic Movies– or cracking open a sedimentary rock. The under-the-table payments at the center of the case, which involved sums of up to $100,000, now seem trivial in comparison to the rapidly escalating figures involved in today’s NIL economy. And the government’s portrayal of the situation was quaint, if not fanciful.
“We hope these charges and arrests serve to keep the sport they love clean and honest,” said Kim, who then turned it over to Bill Sweeney Jr., the assistant director of the FBI’s New York Field Office.
“All of those charged today played a role in creating a pay-to-play culture that has no place in college basketball,” Sweeney said, before delivering his infamous punchline. “Today’s arrests should serve as a warning to anyone considering this kind of business in college athletics: we have your playbook.”
The probe came to be known in the media as the FBI’s college basketball investigation, but as Boone points out, the Bureau was relatively late to the scene. In fact, the work began as part of a securities fraud case involving Louis Martin “Marty” Blazer, a financial advisor accused of embezzling millions from his clients, including several former pro athletes. In a bid to reduce his charges, Blazer told SEC investigators that he had knowledge of widespread bribery in college athletics, and offered to help expose it. The SEC passed the information along to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, who assigned the matter to its public corruption unit.
Boone, who joined the Southern District of New York (SDNY) in 2012, had been on the public corruption beat for approximately a year when he was assigned the task of debriefing Blazer over college sports. From the outset, he said he approached the situation with tempered expectations.
“It was more like, ‘Hey, let’s just talk to the guy and sort of check the box to see if there’s anything there,’” Boone said. And initially, it didn’t seem like there was.
For the first six months of the investigation, it was just Boone and an in-house SDNY staffer conducting interviews of Blazer every few weeks, typically in Boone’s office. Those early conversations focused on bribes Blazer purportedly knew about involving college football coaches and recruits.
“There were many times where we almost ended it,” Boone said. “I remember at one point the SEC wanted to go forward with their case, because they had basically been waiting for us to see if we could get any use out of his proactive cooperation before bringing (securities) charges. It was just taking a while, and it was unclear if we were going to be able to do anything on the sports stuff.”
Nevertheless, Boone continued to engage with Blazer, which ultimately led to his learning about Blazer’s connections to Christian Dawkins, a former AAU basketball coach and talent recruiter for ASM Sports. By then, Dawkins was attempting to launch his own athlete representation business, but he was struggling to find financial backers after being sued by another former employer, International Management Advisors, for allegedly stealing clients and misappropriating the company credit card after he left. Blazer, acting as a cooperating witness, agreed to help Dawkins.
“We got a little bit fortunate in that Christian Dawkins had his own issues at the time that put him in a more desperate position for financial help, and so that kept the conversation going,” Boone said.
On Sep. 15, 2017, nine days before “Ballerz” was made public, Boone represented the government in the court hearing in which Blazer pled guilty to securities fraud. As part of his cooperation agreement, Blazer admitted to having given cash payments to college athletes between 2000 and 2013 to induce them to hire him as their financial advisor when they turned pro.
Persons eventually plead guilty in March 2019 to accepting $91,500 in bribes in exchange for directing Auburn players to Blazer. Dawkins, along with former Adidas reps James Gatto and Merl Code, were convicted by a jury in October 2018 of defrauding three Adidas-sponsored universities—Louisville, Kansas and North Carolina State—by funneling illicit payments to their recruits or their families as inducements to sign with the schools. The athletes included Brian Bowen (Louisville), Billy Preston (Kansas) and Dennis Smith Jr. (NC State).
Boone was not involved in those proceedings, but did lead the two-and-a-half-week trial in May 2019 that earned Dawkins his second conviction for paying bribes to college coaches to steer their players to his upstart agency.
Over the years, Dawkins has suggested, including in interviews last year with Sportico, that the feds had their sights set on Pitino from early on and that Dawkins turned down a plea offer tendered by FBI agents upon his arrest to help make a case against the legendary coach. Pitino, who was never charged, has maintained that he never knew about any bribes taking place, was terminated by Louisville less than a month after charges were announced. He later conceded he “deserved” to be fired, given his leadership role with the Cardinals.
“I don’t think it was accurate to say Pitino was the focus,” Boone told Sportico, though he added: “You always want to get who you think is most responsible for directing the misconduct.”
Throughout the prosecution, Boone emphasized that he and his team remained “very conscious” of the public debate surrounding college athlete compensation.
“That issue was clearly top of mind from the start,” Boone said. “We consciously were not interested in trying to criminalize the mere payment of money going to a player, in and of itself.”
In the end, the government won convictions of nine of the 10 individuals it arrested, five of whom served time in prison. Dawkins had the longest sentence behind bars.
Blazer, who never served jail time, died of natural causes in January 2024 at the age of 53.
As a direct offshoot of “Ballerz,” Boone would go on to successfully prosecute Michael Avenatti, the former attorney for Stormy Daniels, for attempting to extort Nike. According to the government, Avenatti had threatened to publicize allegations about the shoe company making illicit payments to top college basketball recruits. A former SDNY prosecutor, who was representing Nike at the time, tipped off the U.S. Attorney’s Office to the scheme. Avenatti was found guilty in February 2020, the first of several convictions he received in separate, unrelated cases.
After spending 9 1/2 years at the SDNY, Boone left in October 2021 for his current position at WilmerHale. He occasionally runs into his former boss, Joon Kim, who now works six blocks away as a partner at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton. When they cross paths, Boone says, the topic of “Ballerz” tends to come up—and fondly so. (Kim did not respond to an interview request.)
Boone takes comfort in the belief that the prosecutions contributed to desperately needed reform in college athletics.
“I think it helped push the conversation forward,” Boone said. “If the goal is to shine a light on areas of corruption—or areas vulnerable to it—and get people thinking about why that is, whether it should be, and if there’s a way to change it, then I’d like to think I played a part. How change happens is up to those in the space, but I think it was a piece of the puzzle.”
