College basketball's pay-for-play culture has been on trial in New York City, but no one from the NCAA, not even president Mark Emmert, has bothered to show up. (AP)

NEW YORK – Christian Dawkins, Marty Blazer and an undercover FBI agent took a business trip together to Las Vegas. In an effort to appear like a budding, big-money sports agency that could make it rain across college basketball, they rented a hotel suite at the Cosmopolitan.

This was no regular room, either. It had a view of the Strip and blue accent lighting and its own bar just off the living room.

It was big enough to entertain a parade of college basketball assistant coaches in town for a recruiting tournament. The coaches were there to pledge their willingness to sell their players out to Dawkins agency in exchange for the agency providing them the cash that they could use to buy the next round of high school recruits.

Every single guy who walked into that suite should have sensed it was a setup. It looked straight out of the movies — and indeed, there were cameras, albeit hidden by the feds, recording every second of it.

The assistant coaches, as well as Dawkins, were blind to it all though, likely by a measure of desperation over their never-ending need for cash — or “resources” in the recruiting lingo — that they could dole out to recruits, their families, their AAU coaches, trainers, uncles and who knows who the hell else.

Without money, there is no recruiting success. None. That much was made clear, over and over and over, especially by coaches who were fighting the sports' so-called "Blue Bloods" — Duke, North Carolina, Kansas and Kentucky — that they believe are awash in money to spend on the best prospects.

“They’ve got a lot of resources,” Dawkins explained during one meeting that was played Thursday during his federal bribery trial here in Lower Manhattan. “And they’ve got a lot of existing relations with agents, agencies, runners and … Nike.”

In another conversation, Merl Code, a co-defendant in this case, declared, “In some form or fashion, Duke, North Carolina, Syracuse, Kentucky, all of the schools are doing something to help get kids. That’s just part of the space.”

That space is what begat this space, a decked-out suite on the Strip for meetings with assistant coaches from second and third-tier programs trying to keep up with the powerhouses. In and out they came, sometimes wearing university apparel — Arizona, Arizona State, Creighton, Southern Cal, TCU, Oklahoma State, Alabama and so on.

Some got envelopes full of cash — $13,000 here, $6,000 there, plus monthly stipends. Others just had to promise to get any NBA-bound player they coached to sign agency, financial planning and business management contracts with Dawkins, Blazer and the undercover agent. If so, the spigot might open for them.

“Whatever you need me to do, I’ll do it,” then-Alabama assistant coach Yasir Rosemond said on tape, echoing just about everyone’s sentiment. Rosemond didn’t get any money that day or perhaps ever — maybe he knew this was a trap and just wanted to leave.

Or maybe he was like the rest of them, dying for money to compete.

The thing that stood out most as the government played hours of these video tapes Thursday, was the casual anguish in some of their voices. This all seemed perfectly comfortable and normal — getting an envelope of money from a couple guys they didn’t know (Blazer, the undercover agent) because Dawkins (who they did trust) naively vouched for them.

“You [would] have the resources and ammunition, if [you] need it,” Dawkins told then UConn assistant Raphael Chillious of how the deal would help him. Chillious got no money, but he pledged his “1000-percent” support to the idea and made it was clear he needed money for recruiting.

“And you know [I] need,” Chillious said, jokingly.

This is college basketball. This is college athletics. This, playing out on FBI video recording after FBI video recording, is the entire outrageous enterprise that isn’t just corrupt, it is depressing.

It would be more acceptable if this was about players getting some money — even if it was under the table. But what’s clear as you watch all of this is that it is rarely the actual player getting the money. It’s maybe a family member. Or maybe a hanger-on. It's maybe an intermediary, who has set up an entire business around working angles and then tricking kids into bad decisions.

Consider that college assistants offered no hesitation in steering their very own players to this crew.

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