Rumors

Since pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit bribery in March 2019, Chuck Person has been one of the few targets of the Department of Justice’s controversial college basketball corruption probe to have maintained his silence, declining numerous interview requests from reporters until now. In a brief telephone call this week with Sportico, a cautious Person spoke publicly about his former team for the first time since he was sentenced, revealing that he plans to attend Auburn’s Sweet 16 game against Michigan in Atlanta on Friday. “I feel like I had a hand in revitalizing the program,” said Person, who resides in the Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta, Ga.. “We brought in a great bunch of kids, with great talent and great character.”

Sportico

Police in Canada have opened a criminal investigation into the betting scandal that resulted in former Toronto Raptors center Jontay Porter being banned from the NBA, a spokesperson for the Ontario Provincial Police confirmed Wednesday. The OPP’s Investigation and Enforcement Bureau determined that a criminal investigation was warranted after it completed its assessment of betting irregularities related to Raptors games, Robert Simpson, the OPP spokesman, said. The OPP’s active and ongoing investigation will focus on Raptors games in Toronto on Jan. 26, 2024, and March 20, 2024. The alleged betting impropriety has already seen four men charged by the U.S. Department of Justice.

New York Times

Not only is Aspiration no longer a team sponsor, but “investigators from the Justice Department and Commodity Futures Trading Commission are looking into whether Aspiration misled customers about the quality of carbon offsets it was selling, according to people familiar with the matter,” Bloomberg reports.

KTLA 5

TMZ Sports has learned the DOJ launched the inquiry months ago, examining alleged anticompetitive behavior on the part of the NBA, aimed at squashing the Big3's growth. Those allegations, we're told, range from the NBA purportedly throwing its weight around to prevent sponsors and others potential partners from doing business with the rap legend's league ... to discouraging television networks from carrying Big3 games.

TMZ.com

Former NBA player Terrence Williams, the ringleader of a scheme to defraud the NBA’s health plan, pleaded guilty to aggravated identity theft and conspiracy to commit health care and wire fraud, the Department of Justice announced Friday. “Williams led a scheme involving more than 18 former NBA players, a dentist, a doctor, and a chiropractor, to defraud the NBA Players’ Health and Welfare Benefit Plan of millions of dollars,” U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams said in a statement. “Williams also impersonated others to help him take what was not his — money that belonged to the Plan.”

The “Black Lives Matter” decals are gone from the court. There are no social justice messages on the backs of jerseys and no one is kneeling during the playing of the national anthem. Today, the NBA’s activism is conducted in part out of a home office inside a brick, two-story home in Washington, D.C. Built in 1925, the front porch has four columns and a chandelier hanging from the ceiling, all of it underneath an open-air, second-story balcony. The home covers 4,200 square feet and is worth more than $1.4 million. There are four beds and four baths. Inside the office, James Cadogan, 40, has a framed photo of him and former President Barack Obama, for whom he first worked as a campaign aide in 2008, and another photo of him with then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch, whom he served as senior counsel when she headed the U.S. Department of Justice. Also on the wall is Cadogan’s Michael Jordan shooting shirt from 1992.

The Athletic

Sarah Todd: The release from the DOJ U.S. Attorney includes this (text messages) about Keyon Dooling's involvement:

Twitter

REFORM claims to have raised more since then but would not provide CNBC with an exact figure. But since establishing REFORM, Rubin said 13 bills were passed in eight states, including California, where probation is now capped at two years for most violations. He added legislation in Pennsylvania is now at the state senate level. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, “community supervision,” -- those on probation or parole -- dropped from more than 4.1 million individuals supervised to roughly 3.8 million during 2020. And for probation only, down 8.3% the largest annual decline for those on probation since in 1980.

CNBC

James Cadogan: I am the executive director of the National Basketball Social Justice Coalition, which leads the NBA family’s advocacy work. But, in 2014, I was managing the policy portfolio of the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice when Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager, was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri.

Yahoo! Sports

Among its many proposed changes to federal laws regarding policing, the GFPA would: • Limit “qualified immunity” – which protects individual police officers from being held personally liable for monetary damages for constitutional violations under federal law, if the officers did not violate “clearly established” law. • Limit unnecessary use of force, and restrict the use of no-knock warrants, carotid holds and chokeholds. • Create a national registry that would compile dates on complaints and records of police misconduct. • Direct the Department of Justice to create uniform standards to accredit law enforcement agencies, requiring police officers to be trained on racial profiling and implicit bias, and require intervention by other officers when one of their peers uses excessive force.

The Athletic

With the $1 million grant, the LDF was able to further employ staff — attorneys, researchers and organizers to assist with the work of the campaign — in critical cities that have dealt with community-police issues in recent years: from monitoring consent decrees between the Justice Department and the cities of Baltimore and Ferguson, Missouri to working with community members in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and North Charleston, South Carolina, following the respective shooting deaths of Terence Crutcher and Walter Scott by police officers. Jordan’s donation, Ifill says, was also instrumental in supporting the LDF’s Race and Policing Reform Campaign, created in 2018 to “promote unbiased and responsible policing policies and practices at the national, state and local levels,” according to the LDF website. The funds were used to support staffing hires, travel, community initiatives and convenings, as well as strategic communications, including research and publications.

The Undefeated

The client list of Clearview AI, a controversial facial recognition app being used by US law enforcement to identify suspects and other people, has been leaked. Its customers reportedly include not only law enforcement agencies like ICE and the Justice Department, but also companies like retail giant Macy's and the NBA. BuzzFeed News' Thursday report cited an internal document it obtained.

CNET

The team said in a brief announcement the U.S. Justice Department has “granted full restitution to the Kings in the amount of $13.4 million, which was previously seized by the U.S. DOJ and is directly traceable to the fraud committed by former Kings employee Jeff David.

Sacramento Bee

On Wednesday, a Georgia man pleaded guilty to hacking into the Apple accounts of several famous musicians and athletes and spending thousands of dollars from the victims’ accounts. According to the Justice Department, Kwamaine Jerell Ford, 27, obtained the login credentials belonging to dozens of professional athletes, including NBA and NFL players, as well as famous rappers, through a phishing scheme.

The Verge