For months Christian Dawkins argued with would-be investors in his fledgling sports marketing agency that it made no sense to bribe college basketball coaches to encourage their star players to sign with the firm.
Dawkins, a young, ambitious, basketball middleman, kept telling a supposed real estate tycoon named “Jeff D’Angelo” that coaches didn’t have that kind of influence and it would be better to pay the players, their families or their travel team coaches directly. This plan, which was set to occur through a series of meetings during a 2017 recruiting tournament in Las Vegas, lacked “common sense.