A Kansas City, Mo. amateur basketball league coach was indicted by a federal grand jury Thursday for defrauding Duke and three other schools by paying student-athletes, including former Blue Devil Corey Maggette.
According to the 11-count indictment, 39-year-old Myron Piggie paid Maggette $2,000 between April and August 1997, more than a year before he entered Duke as a freshman. Maggette left Duke last spring and now plays for the Orlando Magic.
The fraud charges were filed because Piggie's alleged payments jeopardized Maggette's amateur status, "depriving the schools of their rights to control the allocation of the limited number of athletic scholarships available to all eligible student-athletes," according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney's office in Kansas City.
Although the news release said that Duke had declared Maggette ineligible, the University never took such a step, said John Burness, senior vice president for public affairs and government relations. The release also stated that Duke could potentially forfeit its second-place finish and NCAA tournament revenues from 1998-99, but Burness said no one at the University has discussed the possibility. "I don't know where that whole paragraph came from," he said.
Burness added that while Maggette attended Duke, no one at the University knew about the possibility of the prior payments. "The first we heard anything about this was several months after he had left the University," he said.
Besides Maggette, Piggie also allegedly made payments to the following players while they were in high school: $17,000 to UCLA's Jaron Rush, who declared for the NBA draft yesterday; $14,000 to Korleone Young, who went straight from high school to the NBA; $2,300 to Missouri's Kareem Rush; and $250 to Andre Williams of Oklahoma State.
Piggie, who faces up to 49 years in prison and up to $1.85 million in fines, is being held without bond until a Monday detention hearing. He is also charged with failure to file a federal income tax return, interstate transport of fraudulently obtained funds and illegal possession of a firearm.
"This is not about $50, a pair of shoes and a prom corsage," said U.S. Attorney Stephen Hall. "This was significant money."
The players got the money in cash, sometimes in Nike shoe boxes, and were told to keep the payments a secret, according to the indictment.
The payments were made with the expectation that the players would repay Piggie once they signed professional contracts, according to the indictment. Piggie was also accused of using the players to gain access to sports agents and earn a lucrative Nike contract for himself.
All the players have cooperated with the grand jury and will not be charged.
Burness said Duke also cooperated fully in the investigation. "We were visited last semester by representatives of the U.S. Attorney's office in Kansas City, who asked us a lot of questions about Corey Maggette and what folks here might have known about any possibility that he had received, according to the allegations, some money to play AAU ball during his junior year of high school," he said.
Had the allegations been known while Maggette was still at Duke, he would likely have faced suspension, as the Rush brothers and Williams were for parts of this year while the case was being investigated.
Burness said Duke and other schools are becoming much more attentive to the problems of the largely unregulated summer leagues. "This is clearly an area of increasing concern on the part of the NCAA and institutions and what it means is you have to be that much more careful in terms of recruiting your student-athletes," he said.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
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