NEW YORK CITY – It wasn’t the first time Emanuel “Book” Richardson had been in a despondent locker room, so he knew to trust his instincts. It didn’t matter that he was addressing a bunch of eighth-graders instead of the elite college athletes he had coached for so long. He only knew they were in pain. And if there’s one thing Richardson understands, it’s pain.
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Richardson was coaching the Gauchos, the fabled grassroots program based in the Bronx that has produced more than two dozen NBA players, in his role as director of boys basketball last November. The team had just gotten smoked by Team Melo at a tournament in Hampton, Va. Richardson believed the problem wasn’t inferior talent, but rather a lack of identity and chemistry. The boys just needed more time to practice. Instead of roasting them for their lackluster performance, Richardson quietly proposed a path forward. “If you give me the honor of coaching you these next few months, I promise you will get the best version of me,” he said. “The next time we see this team, we’ll be able to name the score.”
The boys believed him. They all went back to the Bronx, where over the ensuing few months Richardson chomped his whistle, barked orders, and pushed those players to the limit. Sure enough, the Gauchos met Team Melo again at a tournament in suburban Philadelphia in March. “Those kids did everything I asked,” Richardson says. “And we beat the shit out of ’em.”
There is palpable delight in Richardson’s voice as he recounts the story, but there’s also a current of wistfulness. He is glad to be coaching again, gratified to be helping kids from his old neighborhood learn how to be better players and men. Still, he sighs, “I wish right now I was working on a recruiting class. But that’s not the case.”
To the people who know Richardson best and love him most, any victory is worth celebrating. This is, after all, a man who has been on a long and painful losing streak. Over the last five years, Richardson lost his job, his reputation, his wife and, for a time, his freedom.
Richardson was set to begin his ninth season as an assistant at Arizona when the feds arrived at his front door on Sept. 26, 2017. He was charged with multiple counts of bribery and fraud for accepting $20,000 from an agent and financial adviser in return for a promise to steer players their way. He was incarcerated in 2019 after pleading guilty to one count of federal funds bribery in connection with the FBI’s lengthy investigation into college basketball and served 90 days at Otisville (N.Y.) Federal Correctional Institute.
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“For the last five years, I’ve spent so much time inside my own head,” he says. “Am I happy? I don’t know what happiness is anymore. I wake up and I’m appreciative that God has put breath in my body. I’m just not sure. I miss (college) coaching. It defined me. It probably shouldn’t have, but it did.”
Richardson’s efforts to put the sordid mess behind him have been hampered by the glacial pace of the NCAA’s enforcement case against Arizona. The cases against the other three schools (Auburn, Oklahoma State and USC) whose assistants were arrested that day were all resolved within the NCAA’s traditional enforcement structure, but Arizona requested that its case be handled by the NCAA’s recently formed complex case unit. The school’s hearing is supposed to happen later this year. Richardson knows he will eventually be hit with a multi-year show-cause penalty, which is a de facto ban on employment in college. It’s a long shot that he could ever return to college basketball, but it’s a shot he would like to take. In the meantime, all he can do is wait, work and try to get out of his own head.
For most of the last five years, Richardson has suffered in silence, at least as far as the public was concerned. He has repeatedly refused media interviews and declined an invitation to participate in the HBO documentary about the case, “The Scheme.” He had one meeting with the NCAA’s enforcement staff two months after his arrest, but he has not spoken to them since Arizona terminated him in January 2018. Richardson agreed to several hours of interviews with The Athletic and encouraged his family and friends to do the same. During those conversations Richardson admitted to breaking NCAA rules, including violations that were previously undisclosed, and addressed for the first time in detail his incendiary conversations that were secretly recorded by the FBI.
At times, Richardson grew tearful during the interviews. “Excuse my emotions, brother,” he said during one breakdown. “It’s all I’ve got left.” He repeatedly expressed deep regret and profound remorse. But he is also frustrated. Arizona fired his former boss, Sean Miller, last year, but in March, Miller was hired to be the head coach at Xavier. Richardson can’t help but wonder when it will be his turn for a rebirth. “I don’t sit next to you as the victim. I’m flawed,” he says. “I’ve asked for forgiveness from God. I’ve asked for forgiveness from the people who I may have hurt. I didn’t just get fired. I was ostracized. I have a scarlet letter. I have a felony. I did my 90 days and my two years probation. I just want to have an opportunity to move on with my life.”
(Seth Davis / The Athletic)On the day he was released from prison, Richardson woke up early and went for his usual mile run around the track. He collected phone numbers and addresses from other inmates. He gave away most of his clothes. He threw on a sweatsuit his wife had given him, processed his paperwork, and walked out a free man. It should have been a moment to savor, but Richardson was overcome by a powerful desire to stay. “Ninety days is just long enough to get comfortable,” he says. “I had a little survivor’s guilt because it was like, damn, I’m leaving these dudes. And I didn’t have a plan. The one thing that I was really successful at was college basketball, but I couldn’t do that.”
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It is still hard for Richardson to accept that after all those years of defying the odds and avoiding prison, unlike so many of his peers and friends in the New York City neighborhoods where he grew up, he had been incarcerated at 46 – and for this kind of offense. Richardson’s mother had him when she was 15. He doesn’t know much about his biological father and has only a vague recollection of meeting him once when Book was very young. Hoping to give her son a respite from the violence, Richardson’s mom sent him to Alabama to live with his grandmother for a year. (That’s who gave Richardson his nickname when he was a toddler and she caught him rummaging through her pocketbook.) Soon after he got there, he says, two White boys chased him into the woods shouting racial slurs, and then beat him up. He was 6 years old.
Shortly before Book was born, his mother, Michelle, began a relationship with a man named Gene Richardson. They never married, but Book took his surname. Thanks to Gene, the family was, as Richardson puts it, “ghetto rich.” Book always had cash in his pocket, but prosperity came with a price. He was 10 when he first saw a heroin addict keel over and die in the street. He was 12 when he lost his virginity. He was 15 when he started carrying a gun. He didn’t get too deep in the drug trade, but he sold smack here and there for men who were trying to get close to Gene. “I was kind of the neighborhood celebrity, but not realizing what was being taken away from me,” he says.
Things started to turn when he wandered into the Dunlevy Milbank Center on 118th Street. He had always loved to play sports with older boys in the local parks. He wasn’t big, but he had a big personality, and that translated well onto the basketball court. He hooked on with the Riverside Church grassroots program, where St. Raymond’s coach Gary DeCesare spotted him and invited him into the program. Book arrived with plenty of swagger and lots to say. During his first few weeks of school, one of the varsity players, Chuck Martin, stuffed him into a locker. But he was engaging and likable, and he was an innate leader at point guard. “He was a people person, high energy, funny. Everybody liked him,” says Orlando Antigua, Richardson’s close friend and former St. Raymond’s teammate who is now an assistant at Kentucky. “And he was a pit bull on the court. Nobody cheered louder for his teammates.”
As a senior in 1991, Richardson led St. Raymond’s to a New York City championship. He tried to escape the city by accepting an offer to play for Florida Atlantic University, which was then a Division II school, but he was caught cheating in school, stealing money from a laundromat, and carrying a gun on campus. The school sent him home.
Humbled and chastened, Richardson spent a year at Monroe College, a junior college in the Bronx, and then moved on to Pitt-Johnstown, where during his two seasons he led all Division II players in assists per game. After a season as associate head coach at Pitt-Johnstown, he took a job in New York’s financial sector, but he was naturally drawn to teaching and coaching. He worked as a substitute elementary school teacher in the Bronx while also serving as an assistant coach at St. Raymond’s and Monroe. In 2002, Richardson was invited to coach one of the Gauchos’ top high school teams. That put him in the center of the college recruiting mix, where his energy and charisma served him well. He spent one season as an assistant at Marist, left to serve as the Gauchos’ director for two years, and then caught his big break in 2007 when Miller brought him to his staff at Xavier.
Miller was looking for a pipeline into East Coast recruiting. Richardson promptly delivered. The Musketeers went to the Elite Eight and Sweet 16 the next two years, and when Miller was hired away to Arizona, he took Richardson and all his East Coast ties with him. Richardson says that early on in his tenure at Arizona, a recruit’s family told him they wanted $80,000 for him to go there. Richardson isn’t sure if the kid ever got the money, but it made him realize that recruiting at Arizona would be much different than it was at Xavier. He concluded that if he was going to help Miller succeed in Tucson, he would have to operate accordingly.
Richardson insists he never paid players or their representatives directly to sign with Arizona. Rather, he describes a vague, loosely connected netherworld in which he was made aware that money was being moved around, but he usually didn’t know how much was being moved, where it was coming from, or to whom it was going. But he was happy to introduce certain people to certain people, with the understanding that business would get done. “You’re like the bridge. You’re the conduit,” Richardson says, referring to himself. “You’ve got to be able to get some shit done without getting it done. And if you can do that, that makes you great, not good.”
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One of the many people Richardson dealt with during that time was aspiring young agent named Christian Dawkins. Richardson knew that Dawkins had connections with elite high school players, so he cultivated the relationship and invited Dawkins to Tucson. The two weren’t especially close, but their interactions turned out to be inauspicious.
Richardson acknowledges that there were several occasions in which he broke NCAA rules regarding impermissible benefits for recruits and their families during unofficial campus visits. “If someone came on campus and they were hungry, yeah,” he says. “Am I going to put some gas in your tank? I’m going to fill you up. You need a hotel room? I got it. I’ll take care of your airline tickets. Is that illegal (with respect to NCAA rules)? One hundred percent, it’s illegal. I was wrong. And I own that.” Richardson says he dipped into his own pocket to cover these expenses – “The way I looked at it, I was re-investing in my own career” – but he declines to say which players benefited from his largesse. “The last thing I would want to do is put a kid into this,” he says. “A lot of times, the kid didn’t know.”
To those who knew Richardson best, the details of his activities were not always apparent, but they could see the change in his demeanor as he flew, Icarus-like, a little too close to the sun. Martin, the former St. Raymond’s teammate who stuffed Richardson in a locker, was working as an assistant at Indiana when he saw his old pal strut into a gym and receive high-fives and hosannas like he was some kind of celebrity. “I told him, ‘I get it, you’re rolling right now, but take a deep breath and slow down,’” Martin says. “He understood what that meant, but he didn’t want to hear it.”
Those concerns were echoed by Richardson’s wife, Erin, whom he met while they were in college at Monroe. She, too, noticed her husband was getting “a little too cocky,” and she regularly overheard phone conversations that were concerning, to say the least. She was stunned when he took her to the Final Four in Houston in 2016, walked into a hotel lobby, and was swarmed by his peers. She was further disturbed by another problem that was creeping into their marriage – her husband’s chronic infidelity. While they tried to work things out in couples therapy, Erin came to believe that once their two kids reached college age, their marriage would likely dissolve.
One day, Book asked Erin if it was OK for someone to wire money into their joint checking account. Erin didn’t know who the person was or why he wanted to send them money, but she adamantly refused. She tried to warn her husband – again – that he was moving too fast and taking too many chances. As usual, it fell on deaf ears. “It was enticing for him to be in demand like that. It was like a drug,” she says. “I knew what he was doing could get him fired. I never in my wildest dreams thought it would get him arrested.”
When Richardson’s 16-year-old son, E.J., heard a knock early on that fateful September morning, he assumed it was the gardeners. When he opened the door and came face-to-face with a team of FBI agents asking if his father was home, he figured it was a case of mistaken identity. Book was equally shocked when the men put him in handcuffs, escorted him into a police car, and drove him to a local jail without explanation. E.J. immediately called Erin, who was in New York, where she had taken a new job, and delivered the news.
The government’s case against Richardson centered on his relationship with Dawkins. Richardson had been caught by FBI wiretaps and undercover agents accepting $20,000 from Dawkins and financial adviser Munish Sood – $5,000 was offered, $15,000 was solicited by Richardson – between February and September 2017 in return for a promise to help them sign Arizona players as clients after they turned pro. Richardson was charged with multiple counts of bribery and fraud. Ten men, including three other assistant coaches, were arrested that day, and the revelations rocked the sport. Arizona immediately put Richardson on paid leave and then fired him in January. Richardson hired a lawyer and tried to enlist the help of friends and colleagues, but many of the people who once eagerly took his calls suddenly went radio silent.
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The community that most rallied around him was the one from St. Raymond’s. During a conversation with one of those teammates about 10 days after his arrest, Richardson revealed that he was sitting in his living room holding a revolver he had borrowed from a neighbor. He suggested that the revolver might be the easiest way out of this mess. When Martin heard about this, he dialed up his old teammate and delivered an expletive-filled ass chewing. “You’re gonna do this with your son upstairs? You’re gonna let E.J. find you this way?” Martin screamed. As Martin dropped one f-bomb after another, Richardson quietly responded by repeating, Yes, sir … yes, sir … “When I heard him say that, I became even more aggressive,” Martin says. “I didn’t know how he was going to react, but my instinct was that he needed clarity and a strong message. I told him, ‘Put E.J. to bed, hug him, tell him you love him, and get this shit out of your head.’”
Richardson’s decision to take money from Dawkins and Sood landed him in jail, but two other conversations caught on FBI wiretaps also damaged his reputation. The first, which was played during the government’s trial against Dawkins and former Adidas executive Merl Code, revealed Richardson bragging to Dawkins that Miller had paid former Arizona center (and future No. 1 NBA Draft pick) Deandre Ayton $10,000 per month to come to Arizona. The second was part of a transcript that was never introduced as evidence at the trial but reported afterward by Yahoo Sports. During that conversation, Richardson told two undercover FBI agents that he paid $40,000 to a high school coach to falsify the academic transcript of Rawle Alkins, a 6-5 guard from New York City who played for Arizona from 2016-18.
Richardson acknowledges it was his voice on those tapes, but he insists the payments never happened. They were pure fabrications. He buttresses that claim by pointing out that despite having the ability to subpoena all of Richardson’s and Miller’s financial records, the FBI produced no evidence that such payments took place. “That would have been the smoking gun,” Richardson says. “I’m being as honest as I can with this thing. I was recruiting. (Dawkins) wants to do business. … He’s telling me, ‘I got this.’ I’m like, ‘Hey, I got that.’ (It’s like I was) selling him an exotic car. Zero to 60 in three seconds, you ever see it? You get caught up with the banter back and forth. I thought that whole agency thing was full of shit to be 100 percent honest.”
As for the $20,000 he did receive, Richardson told the undercover agents that he planned to give it to the mother of Jahvon Quinerly, a point guard from New Jersey who committed to Arizona later that summer. Richardson now says that he spent some of that money during a trip to Spain with Erin, but he intended to use the rest of it to pay for Quinerly and his family to travel that fall to Tucson for an unofficial visit to Arizona’s Midnight Madness, which would have been another NCAA violation. Richardson, however, was arrested before he could do so. (Quinerly subsequently de-committed from Arizona and is now at Alabama.)
In January 2019, Richardson reached a deal with prosecutors in which he pleaded guilty to a single count of federal funds bribery for the money he took from Dawkins and Sood. The other four charges were dismissed. Six months later, he was sentenced to 90 days in federal prison. “All because I took $20,000,” he says, shaking his head. “I wish I could untake it.”
When Richardson entered the Otisville facility on July 18, 2019, he became the first person connected with the FBI’s case to start serving time. Otisville has been described by Forbes magazine as “one of America’s cushiest prisons,” but Richardson anguished over what awaited him – or more accurately, didn’t await him – when he got out. He says that at one point, he was so mentally checked out that he couldn’t recall his own birthday. “My brain turned off,” he says. Erin and their two children visited him, and he was able to email with a few friends. For the most part, however, he was shut off from the outside world.
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Not surprisingly, Richardson spent a lot of his time on the basketball court, playing in pickup games and helping fellow inmates perfect their shooting form. He got into a fight once with an inmate who wanted to shoot at the same basket, but for the most part Richardson assimilated to prison life. He exercised, lost some weight, washed police cars, worked in the garage for meager pay, wrote in a journal and read nearly a dozen books.
Prison was frightening and miserable, but at least it offered certainty. On the day Richardson was released, he had little money and few prospects of earning any. Erin had filed for divorce, but she and Book lived together in her New York City apartment until Book’s two years’ probation period was up. The walls closed in further when the COVID-19 pandemic struck in the spring of 2020.
A friend invited Richardson to attend church on Christmas Eve 2020. On his way home, he climbed a bridge on 145th Street and called some friends to say goodbye. He didn’t jump, but it wasn’t the last time he had suicidal thoughts. His buddies banded together to check in on him as much as possible. When they took him to dinner, he would often collapse in tears. “You’d call him, and he would all of a sudden go off and start apologizing,” Martin says. “He’d say over and over, ‘I let you down, I let your wife down, I let St. Raymond’s down, New York City. I’m so embarrassed.’ I’m like, ‘Stop, you don’t have to do that.’ But his spirit was broken.”
Richardson eventually moved into his own sparsely furnished apartment in Edgewater, N.J. He also found a source of income – and more important, a sense of purpose – when the Gauchos asked him to come back as director of the boys program. The job pays $3,000 a month. Richardson has been able to supplement that by training players on the side, but there aren’t a lot of available hours on his schedule. Asked whether he is paying the bills, Richardson replies, “A little late, but they get paid.”
Little by little, step by step, he is working his way back to happiness, whatever that is. In the fall of 2019, he struck up a conversation with Sivel DeJesus, a local elementary school teacher whose sixth-grade son was playing for the Gauchos. They continued their casual dialogue for nearly nine months before Richardson got the courage to ask her out on a date. More than two years later, they are still dating. “This is the first time in my life I’ve been monogamous,” he says. Richardson has told DeJesus that he would like to marry her, and she hasn’t exactly said no. “Yes, well, maybe sometime next year,” DeJesus says. “Book has such a big heart for everyone. That drew me to him, but it’s also his downfall because every single parent can reach out to him and he’ll answer no matter what time it is. People take advantage of that, but he honestly just wants the best for the kids.”
DeJesus has not yet met Erin, but the way things are tracking, that meeting is likely to occur soon – and be quite cordial. Now that Erin and Book are divorced and living apart, they have never gotten along better. “We’re the best of friends,” Erin says. “We talk to each other freely. We laugh, we joke, sometimes we’re crying about things in the past. He’s an amazing person and a wonderful father. He just wasn’t ready to be a husband.”
Erin has since moved back to Arizona, where she lives with their two children, E.J. and Sere, as well as Sere’s husband and their young son. “It was very difficult to see him go through all of this, but the silver lining is it brought us closer,” E.J. says. “He’s such a strong human being. When he’s feeling like there’s nobody in his corner, I let him know I’m with him there as well.”
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Richardson meets with a therapist every Saturday morning. She is helping him process his pain and guilt. No matter how chaotic Richardson’s schedule is, as long as he is in town he never breaks that appointment.
As for Miller, Richardson has only seen his former boss once since his arrest, at a grassroots tournament in Arizona in the summer of 2019. They said a quick, awkward hello. That aside, they have had no communication. Richardson doesn’t begrudge Miller his fresh start at Xavier, but he doesn’t hide his disappointment over the way Miller has treated him. “I don’t even know how I’m supposed to feel towards him anymore,” Richardson says. “Am I supposed to hate him? I have no ill feelings towards him. I’m just saying, with everything that’s happened, just see how I’m doing, man. Just care about that. I can only assume lawyers are telling him not to say anything, but I worked for you for 11 years. Just see how I’m doing.”
Miller declined to comment for this story, citing the ongoing NCAA investigation.
Richardson still gets regular emails from the NCAA’s complex case unit requesting an interview. He doesn’t bother answering. “I can’t afford representation anymore,” he says. “Everyone still wants me to tell on Arizona. I’m like, guys, what do you want me to tell? None of the coaches are there, none of the kids are there.” At some point, presumably, the panel will consider the pair of Level I violations that were levied against Richardson in the Notice of Allegations that the NCAA sent to Arizona in October 2020. The first was for taking the $20,000 from Dawkins and Sood, which he has admitted. The second was for arranging or knowing about the $40,000 payment to falsify Alkins’ transcript, which Richardson denies. Whatever the NCAA decides, Richardson knows it will be a long time before he gets another chance to coach in college, if that chance comes at all. “There have been worse atrocities committed against the college landscape, and those people have gotten second and third opportunities,” Antigua says. “I don’t know in what form that comes for Book, but I’ll be there cheering him on and rooting for him when it does happen.”
Richardson has finally decided that instead of running from all the controversy, he’s ready to lean into it. In late May, he was invited to speak at the Black Student-Athlete Summit about his experiences. The organization covered his travel and paid him a $2,500 appearance fee. Richardson thought he would feel nervous as he recounted his lowest moments, but he was comfortable from the outset. “It felt like a home game for me,” he says. “I’m even able to laugh at some of it. That’s progress, but it still hurts.”
He turns 50 in December. “Never thought I’d turn 50,” he says. “Hopefully, God willing, I can make it.” Indeed, Richardson has learned the hard way not to look too far into the future, but at least he’s no longer dwelling on the past. “I’m in such an honest space right now, and it’s extremely liberating,” he says. “I’ve owned everything I’ve done. I’ve been embarrassed, I’ve been ridiculed, I’ve been (called) the scum of the earth. But I’m no longer gonna say sorry for everything I’ve done. I’ve come a long way, but I’ve still got a long way to go.”
(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; photo: Richard Drew/ Associated Press)
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