excerpts from Sports Illustrated:
More than a dozen current and former college coaches — including Texas Tech’s Billy Gillispie, Arizona’s Lute Olson, Baylor’s Scott Drew and Gonzaga’s Mark Few — are believed to have lost investments most recently valued at over $7.8 million combined with the late Houston-area businessman and AAU basketball operator J. David Salinas, sources close to the matter tell SI.com.
According to documents reviewed by SI.com, the value of Gillispie’s investment alone was purported to be $2.3 million; Olson’s, $1.17 million; Drew’s, $621,000; Few’s, $353,000.
Salinas, who committed suicide on Sunday amid a months-long investigation into his businesses by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, died at age 60 from a gunshot wound at his home in Friendswood, Texas. He was the chairman of the eponymous J. David Financial Group in Friendswood, the founder of the Houston Select AAU basketball program and a Houston, Rice and Wichita State donor…..
The current list of known investors involves at least 100 accounts in all, the majority of them not sports-related, with the grand total of dollars at risk ranging well into several tens of millions of dollars…. No existing NCAA bylaw prohibits university representatives from investing in what they believe to be legitimate securities, but a conflict of interest would seem to arise when the head of a successful AAU program is also the person managing (and profiting from) those investments.