Avenatti Says Texts Show Nike Was Willing to Pay Elite Recruits

(Bloomberg) -- Ever since Michael Avenatti was charged in March with trying to extort more than $20 million from Nike Inc., he’s claimed that the company set him up to hide its own crimes. Now, the embattled California lawyer is seeking to beef up his case by previewing what he describes as extensive evidence of wrongdoing by Nike’s Elite Youth Basketball League.

Avenatti on Wednesday filed a 50-page motion to dismiss the federal charges in New York, in which he cited Nike’s willingness to pay elite recruits, including Zion Williamson and Romeo Langford. Avenatti doesn’t include evidence that Nike followed through on making the offers.

But Nike has text messages, emails and other documents from 2016 and 2017 that prove executives arranged for and hid payments to amateur players, their families and handlers, Avenatti said. He said he got the material in pretrial exchange of evidence.

In one text message to a university coach, a Nike official says the company is “funneling payments to high school players through at least ten different EYBL coaches.” Another Nike executive who led EYBL’s event strategy “expressed concern to a colleague about carrying large amounts of cash through airport security and indicated that she would lie and ‘just say I just sold my car’ if she got stopped,” according to the filing.

“Nike will not respond to the allegations of an individual facing federal charges of fraud and extortion,” the company said in an email. “Nike will continue its cooperation with the government’s investigation into grassroots basketball and the related extortion case.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Erik Larson in New York at elarson4@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.net, Joe Schneider, Peter Jeffrey

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