Lance Jay Luchnick, a Texas-based agent, paid...

Lance Jay Luchnick, a Texas-based agent, paid high school and college coaches to influence such future National Basketball Assn. players as Cliff Levingston, Ricky Pierce and Terry Catledge to sign with him, Newsday reported.

In the first installment of a two-part series, the newspaper said that Luchnick, who lives in San Antonio and has an office in Houston, paid the coaches with the understanding that they were to keep some of the money and that some of it was to go to players.

Luchnick, 37, told the paper he has never used coaches to acquire clients or given coaches cash or gifts as paybacks for helping him sign players.

But he said that he has done favors for friends who are coaches. Confronted with check stubs from his corporate checking account, he acknowledged that he gave gifts and some cash payments to those coaches.