




"The purpose was to build a relationship with them and secure the possibility that they were going to hire me as their financial adviser when they turned pro," said Blazer, a financial and investment adviser who has pleaded guilty to charges and is testifying in hopes for leniency.


"I was later to find out that I wasn't the only person paying these guys," he said. "There were other financial advisers and other agents paying them as well."



"Timing is everything," he said. "If a family member asks you to get something and you didn't do it, that relationship could be lost. ... If you don't take advantage of what somebody's asking, they're just going to get it from somebody else."


"You have a ton of leverage over a college coach," Blazer said. "They could get fired."

Prosecutors played one recorded conversation in which former assistant basketball coach Lamont Evans, who has coached at South Carolina and Oklahoma State, complained to Blazer that he hadn't been paid his full $2,500 monthly fee.

Boone asked Blazer what Evans meant when he told him that if he wasn't fully paid, he could "get it back from somebody else."

Blazer said Evans meant "he could easily find another financial adviser, business adviser, to step in and take our place."

Then Evans was heard on the tape bragging that he'd keep competitors out of the way if he was properly compensated.

"Anybody else that comes along, I'm going to bury them," Evans said.

Evans has pleaded guilty, along with former assistant basketball coaches Tony Bland at USC, Emanuel "Book" Richardson at Arizona and Chuck Person at Auburn University. They await sentencing. Person had been scheduled for a June trial.

Lawyers for Dawkins and Code say their clients committed no crime.