NEW YORK _ He hustled his way into the basketball world through bribes _ and when he got caught, he tried hustling a jury.
That was the message Friday from a prosecutor delivering closing arguments in the trial of aspiring sports agent Christian Dawkins, who is accused of making secret payments to college basketball coaches in exchange for their help steering players to him as clients.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Noah Solowiejczyk told the jury in Manhattan Federal Court that Dawkins, 26, had lied to them on the stand.
"He was trying to hustle you by lying about what happened under oath," Solowiejczyk said.
"You can't trust a word that Christian Dawkins said to you over the past few days. Not a word."
Dawkins is on trial alongside former Adidas consultant Merl Code, who is also accused of conspiring to bribe coaches at schools including the University of Arizona, the University of Southern California, Creighton University and Texas Christian University.
Dawkins is accused of paying the bribes to build up his sports agent business. Sports agents negotiate contracts between athletes and professional leagues like the NBA.
Code and Dawkins were cravenly manipulating talented basketball players making critical decisions about their financial futures, Solowiejczyk said.
"Thanks to the defendants' bribes, the fix was already in," he said.
"Unbeknownst to these athletes, it was because the coaches were getting paid off."
Dawkins testified in his own defense that while he paid players and their families, he thought paying coaches was "idiotic." He said he never did because it would be a waste of money. College coaches, he argued, have no influence over players who only spend one year in college before declaring for the NBA draft.
"There's no need to pay a college coach because these players are coming into college with agents. This idea that it's an amateur world is not real," he said.
But prosecutors then confronted Dawkins with secretly recorded conversations in which he spoke at length about paying coaches.
"He cheats. He lies to get ahead," Solowiejczyk said.
"The reason these payments were all in cash is because the defendants knew for their scheme to succeed they needed not to get caught."
Dawkins and Code have already been sentenced to six months in prison each for conspiring to bribe the father of a college basketball prospect to attend the University of Louisville. The case against them has shined a light on corruption in the NCAA, where big money rides on unpaid student athletes on the verge of signing lucrative contracts once they turn pro.
