(ESPN/AP/KUSports.com) Kansas and North Carolina State are the latest schools to be swept up in a bribery scandal involving college basketball.
A rewritten indictment released Tuesday in New York alleges that an Adidas representative arranged for payments to parents of athletes willing to commit to the schools.
Prosecutors said the Adidas representative, James Gatto, and others agreed to pay $90,000 to the mother of a Kansas recruit. There are two players detailed in the KU portion of the document, and the timelines of those athletes’ commitments appears to match up with those of former freshman forward Billy Preston and soon-to-be sophomore forward Silvio De Sousa, both members of the 2017-18 squad.
Prosecutors say money helped secure the players’ commitments to play college basketball at the schools and encouraged them to sign an Adidas sponsorship deal when they entered the NBA.
The indictment says the scheme was designed to conceal the payments and defrauded the university of Kansas.
The KU mens basketball post season banquet was held last night and Coach Bill Self said the news took some of the luster off of the evening.
The university’s director of strategic communications, Joe Monaco released a statement Tuesday night. “Earlier today, we learned that the University of Kansas is named as a victim in a federal indictment. The indictment does not suggest any wrongdoing by the university, its coaches or its staff. We will cooperate fully with the investigation in this matter. Because this is an active investigation, it is not appropriate for us to comment further at this time.”
