NEW YORK — Book Richardson doesn’t sleep much past 5:30 a.m. anymore.
That was around the time seven years ago that FBI agents pounded on his door, barged in, handcuffed him and dragged him away while his 16-year-old son, E.J., looked on helplessly.
“Ever since then, everyone looks at me differently,” the former University of Arizona assistant coach told The Associated Press about his arrest, part of a sting designed to clean up college basketball. “And I don’t fall back to sleep when I see that time come up on the clock.”
He is one of four assistant coaches — along with a group of six agents, their financial backers and shoe company representatives — who were arrested in the 2017 federal probe aimed at rooting out an entrenched system of off-the-books payments to players and their families that, at the time, was against NCAA rules.
All four assistants — Richardson, Lamont Evans, Tony Bland and Chuck Person — are Black. Of the 10 men arrested, only one was White.
“Low-hanging fruit,” the 51-year-old Richardson said when asked why Black men took the brunt of the punishment. “Who do you see all the time that’s out there? Black assistants. Who is forging the relationships? Black assistants.”
Several coaches and other insiders told the AP it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Black men ended up as the fall guys, given the racial lines along which careers often play out in the sport.
An AP analysis of schools in the six biggest basketball conferences found the ranks of Black assistant coaches have risen from 51% to 59% between 2014 and 2023. But Black men command only about 30% of head-coaching positions.
Heading into this week’s Final Four, all the arrested assistants are banned by the NCAA, while the agents and shoe reps saw their connections in the college world vanish.
“Some people in the college space I very rarely talk to because, to them, I’m toxic,” said Merl Code, a Black former rep for Nike and Adidas who served 5½ months in jail for convictions in the case.
Meanwhile, most of the head coaches Richardson and the others worked with are White and still have jobs in college basketball.
Richardson served 90 days in jail and says he wears the “scarlet letter F” — for felon — now. The NCAA booted him out of college hoops for 10 years. Evans got a three-month jail sentence and a 10-year ban; the other two arrested assistants weren’t jailed but were banned by the NCAA.
Some see promise in the fact that Black men fill more assistant coaching positions now than in 2014. Others believe that while opportunities have expanded for African-Americans, they are still the lower-paid, higher-risk jobs in the “talent-acquisition” part of the game that’s rife with turnover and shadowy dealmaking — and landed Richardson and others in jail.
“Obviously if we knew exactly how to fix it, maybe we would already have done it,” said Florida State’s longtime head coach, Leonard Hamilton, who is Black. “It’s been something they were discussing when I got into coaching in 1971.”
These days, Richardson runs the boys’ basketball program for the New York Gauchos, a venerated hoops proving ground based in a gym near the 149th St-Grand Concourse subway stop in the Bronx.
Whereas he says he made “2-3 hundred thousand dollars a year” at Arizona, he now clears around three grand a month. He is shaping lives with the Gauchos in much the same way he did as a college assistant — doling out everything from advice to tough love to recommendations about high school and college.
For decades, college recruiting has involved relationships, starting with shoe-company reps, who identify talented players as early as junior high. They connect with college assistant coaches, who stay close in hopes of signing the players the shoe guys know. Then, there are the agents, who try to gain influence with all parties in the hopes of landing a piece of the action if a player turns pro.
Underpinning it all is the quiet and, prosecutors said, illegal movement of money to the players and their families, who often come from poor backgrounds.
“Some of these guys have parents on disability. Some have ailing grandmothers who can’t afford their medicine,” said Code, who remains unapologetic about using shoe-company money to help families. “These are young men and women who have actual, real-life situations they’re dealing with at a really young age and they’re using their athletic ability to assist their families through their struggle.”
When the charges against Richardson, Code and the rest were announced, an FBI assistant director boldly proclaimed, “We have your playbook.” The arrests came after an undercover operation that lured the accused into meetings in hotel suites and, in one case, a yacht where they picked up envelopes of cash.
One defendant, Christian Dawkins, who is Black, was sentenced to 18 months in jail. In a documentary about the case, “The Scheme,” Dawkins, who worked as an agent, is heard on a wiretap spelling out the risks assistant coaches take in their recruiting efforts.
“These guys have worked their whole lives to get to this point,” Dawkins tells an undercover FBI agent. “And if one thing goes wrong, and not to make this a race thing, but especially a guy that’s a Black assistant coach, if you have one (expletive) thing happen to you, you’ll never coach again, and that’s the bottom line.”
Richardson now lives on the outskirts of an industry that has, in fact, undergone a seismic change, though not in the way the FBI thought it would.
New state laws and court rulings over the past three years have brought about the so-called “NIL” era in college sports — for name, image and likeness compensation deals for athletes. Players can now profit through sponsorship deals that begin as early as high school.
Richardson says NIL should stand for “Now It’s Legal” — a nod to the harsh reality that most of those under-the-table payments for which he was jailed can be made legitimately now.
“Truth be told, out of 10 people who got arrested, nine of those guys were some kind of shade of me,” he said. “And now, none of us are coaching, which we were pretty good at. And we weren’t good because we were cheating. We were good at what we did.”
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