International agents make money placing foreign athletes at U.S. schools
The project would eventually take two years and involve more than 750 interviews in 11 countries and 13 states and U.S. territories.
But it started as local sports coverage about a group of African teenagers enrolling at a small Christian high school in Dayton, Ohio. The fact that they were very tall and played basketball seemed a little suspicious to us.
Then we noticed more foreign players scattered across Ohio and other states, many of them linked through a small group of shadowy people working to bring foreign athletes to the United States - individuals portrayed as good Samaritans whose only interest was in helping kids from poor countries.
The athletes first got the attention of Dayton Daily News sports reporter Doug Harris, who began asking more questions. Soon, editors at the paper were getting suspicious, too.
As we learned of more and more players, stories told by school officials and coaches about how the young foreign athletes got to this country seemed to grow more and more unbelievable. Some called players war refugees, narrowly escaping their native countries with their lives. One player's official records claimed he escaped a 'civil war,' a conflict nowhere to be found in State Department records or in the memories of the citizens of that country.
This was an almost impossible story to document. The truth was thousands of miles away, in countries some Americans had never heard of. And there were few records challenging anything anybody was saying.
But we had to try. Lying to get around American amateur sports rules or to get a visa, we soon learned, was considered part of the game, no more of a sin than fudging on income taxes.
The system policing all this, we learned, was never geared to root out deception or conduct investigations overseas. School officials and coaches in most cases were trusted to report violations.
We started our reporting by making simple lists of athletes, grouping them by the person who helped them come to the United States - people we called middlemen. Middlemen usually were Americans or foreign nationals living in the United States, former and current coaches, former amateur and professional players; at least one was running what was identified as a foreign student exchange program.
Just by gathering all the background we could on these middlemen through hundreds of interviews and searches of property records, criminal records, civil lawsuits, bankruptcy records, corporation records and other public records, the official stories began to unravel.
Mounting lies
Searching newspaper clippings, we found that several Serbian and Bosnian players all claimed an 'uncle' helped them come to the United States. We found that the players weren't related, but they all had the same uncle, a former professional player from Bosnia. Property records showed he owned a large house in an upscale area of Long Island, even though the last full-time job we could link him to was waiting tables at a New York restaurant. A trip to his house was followed by a call to the reporter from a New York sports agent asking us what we wanted.
We linked several other players from all over the world to a former teacher in Minnesota, a wife and mother of two who claimed she was running a foreign exchange program. We used public records searches to identify players who actually used her address, but some of them denied even knowing her. A woman in Texas didn't know why her name was linked to the Minnesota address either. That woman turned out to be her sister.
Since a number of people seemed to be lying and since records were scarce, we decided early on to tape all of our interviews.
After months of work and hundreds of interviews, the lies began to mount. But we were still spinning our wheels. We had no motive, no money trail and nothing to explain why so many people told so many lies.
This was a very different and difficult type of investigative project for the newspaper, one with no clear paper trails, no databases and no whistleblowers pointing the way to the truth.
We needed more information and several of the players we needed to interview had gone back to their home countries for the summer, so we decided to go overseas, thinking some would be more willing to talk in their homes.
Our first stop was Estonia. We looked for a man named Maarten van Gent, identified by high school officials as a coach who had helped several of his players come to the United States through a middleman in Virginia. Host families said van Gent, who had players at high schools in West Virginia and Ohio, would make mysterious calls to their homes at night asking to speak to the players.
Our translator found van Gent's apartment by contacting the Estonian basketball federation. The apartment was on one of two floors he had purchased atop a high-rise overlooking the capital city, Tallinn. The apartment had a private gym, tanning booth, gambling machines, windows specially shipped from Belgium, wall-sized oil paintings and a spiral staircase leading to a private rooftop patio.
Immediately we knew this man was no coach; he was a sports agent.
Soon the story became clear to us: Sports agents were behind all of it, using middlemen to get their athletes into American high schools and colleges, where the players could hone their skills and come back and make even more money for the agents.
The middlemen had several motives. Some stood to get a percentage of a player's salary later on. Others charged families overseas to place their children in American high schools or to get athletic scholarships in American colleges and universities.
But there was still the wall of lies. Van Gent, while admitting he was a sports agent and that he helped players go to America, denied having any contracts or other financial interest in players. He was just lending a helping hand.
We interviewed athletes and others in the United States, Estonia, Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro, Italy, Slovenia, Central African Republic, The Netherlands, Spain, France and Serbia.
We benefited greatly by hiring translators to help us locate many of the athletes well in advance of our trips. Taib Bajramovic, a Bosnian journalist whose association with the Dayton Daily News began with the U.S. troop deployment in 1996, helped us arrange several interviews in Bosnia, Croatia and Montenegro and even conducted an interview for us in Slovenia. Cesar Jimenez, of Madrid, a senior journalist with a company that keeps statistics for the Spanish Football League, arranged a number of interviews and located athletes and coaches for us in several cities across Spain.
Bajramovic, who covered the war in Bosnia, also helped us tear apart the stories of a number of Bosnian basketball players, all claiming they came to American high schools to escape war. Their stories were told numerous times in American newspapers and on television, and those stories prompted athletic officials to bend the rules and allow them to play high school basketball. But their stories turned out to be less than the whole truth.
Hard evidence
In every country, the stories told by the athletes seemed identical: They were never paid to play sports. They were not represented by an agent. They never signed a contract. Everyone who helped them find a school was just a nice person who wanted to help kids.
What made us suspicious was that many of them would volunteer all this information without ever being asked a question, as if they were coached on what to say. So we tried a different approach: Rather than asking them if they ever had a contract or an agent, we just asked them when they signed their contracts.
It worked. The very first player in Estonia brought out his contract with van Gent and so did the next. After months of reporting, this was the first hard evidence we had. After hundreds of interviews, we linked several of the middlemen and dozens of players to sports agents.
The key, we found, was in first understanding how the system worked and approaching it from that standpoint, not expecting someone else to volunteer anything. The people we interviewed, we found, were only going to talk about concepts we already understood. If we knew nothing, they would talk about the game. If we knew a foreign sports agent brought them to the United States, some still denied it, but some offered explanations.
Though we knew coaches, middlemen and even players all stood to gain from all this, we believed there must be victims, too.
The American system of amateur athletics, which was being used as little more than a training ground for foreign athletes and their agents, was the first victim we found. Hometown players whose families had invested years in the school were suddenly cut from teams when more talented foreign players arrived.
The foreign athletes also displaced legitimate foreign exchange students.
The real victims, however, were overseas.
In countries where $200 a month is considered a good salary, families sold their apartments, their cars or took out loans to pay hundreds or even thousands to middlemen to get athletic scholarships at American schools for their children. One agency charged 10 percent of the scholarship value.
Though selling scholarships is one of the most flagrant violations of American athletic rules, the business was practically public in some countries, with one Belgrade newspaper advertising a company offering athletic scholarships in America.
In Serbia, we interviewed a family that paid a middleman $3,500 to find the son a college basketball scholarship. After staying with the college coach for several days, the boy was stranded at a Delaware motel and never played college sports.
One Yugoslavian family paid $17,600 to an agency for athletic scholarships for their twins. The same agency placed nearly 30 athletes at colleges to play basketball, volleyball, soccer or to swim.
Amateur athletics at every level - high schools, small private colleges and big Division I NCAA universities - were affected.
Our examination of foreign athletes in American sports opened the eyes of coaches, administrators and college and high school regulators. Five state athletic associations conducted investigations after the series. The Ohio High School Athletic Association handed down the most severe penalties in its history to Dayton Christian High School for numerous violations involving international athletes. The National Federation of High School Associations is pushing for new regulations limiting the number of foreign athletes on teams nationwide and has printed brochures informing students and coaches about the rules governing eligibility. The NCAA investigated several of the players highlighted in the series and ruled them ineligible, and the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics reported it would revamp some of its eligibility rules in direct response to the series.
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