Tarkanian, NCAA Investigators Now Into Round 2 : College basketball: But this time, Nevada Las Vegas coach is expected to resolve matters without going to court.

One of sports’ most compelling legal battles has, after 13 years, nearly run its course. The case of Nevada Las Vegas basketball Coach Jerry Tarkanian vs. the NCAA is only a couple of conference calls away from a resolution that probably will bring sanctions against the UNLV program rather than the suspension of its coach, the issue that got the whole thing started in the first place.

But as one battle ends for Tarkanian, another looms.

For most of the last 2 1/2 years, NCAA investigators have crisscrossed the country contacting former UNLV players and recruits and combed through UNLV athletic department files as part of a preliminary inquiry--the initial, fact-finding stage of an NCAA investigation--into the UNLV basketball program. The last time the NCAA took such a look at the Rebels, Tarkanian wound up taking the NCAA to court, and the atmosphere surrounding the current investigation is much as it was 13 years ago.

UNLV officials, Tarkanian included, say they are committed to cooperating with the NCAA. Nonetheless, there are signs that this isn’t your everyday investigation.

The central figure in the case, former UNLV recruit Lloyd Daniels, has charged that an NCAA investigator attempted to bribe him for information damaging to UNLV. A junior college coach has written NCAA Executive Director Dick Schultz to pass on a student manager’s complaint that an NCAA investigator represented himself as a reporter in attempting to talk with a former UNLV player.

NCAA officials generally hold their tongues. They are not supposed to comment publicly on active cases--company policy. Privately, however, they speak of a frustrating case. One person familiar with the investigation speaks of sources “killing you with kindness and then disappearing.” Says another: “The threat is out.”

At the heart of the matter is Daniels, a 6-foot-8 swingman from New York whose ability on the court has been matched only by his uncanny ability to find trouble off it.

When Daniels signed with UNLV in April of 1986, he read at a third-grade level and had just dropped out of Andrew Jackson High in Queens, the fourth high school he had attended. But after attending Mt. San Antonio College in the fall of ‘86, he enrolled at UNLV as a full-time student, and he was on track to play for the Rebels as a junior college transfer until he was arrested on drug charges in Las Vegas in February of 1987. The arrest prompted Tarkanian to announce immediately that Daniels would never play at UNLV.

As it turned out, Daniels would be gone, but not forgotten.

A month later, a series of stories in Newsday outlined ways in which UNLV coaches, boosters and other representatives of the school apparently broke NCAA rules in their dealings with Daniels. The series showed how Daniels received a variety of special privileges--including cash, a car and a motorcycle--while attempting to become eligible to play for the Rebels. Many of the allegations focused on Mark Warkentien, UNLV’s basketball recruiting coordinator at the time, who had become Daniels’ legal guardian.

UNLV President Robert Maxson appointed a committee to conduct an in-house investigation, but after reviewing the matter for nearly seven months, the committee informed Maxson that it couldn’t reach any conclusions. The committee recommended to Maxson that he turn the matter over to the Pacific Coast Athletic Assn. (now known as the Big West) and the NCAA.

“On the Daniels situation, I definitely feel everything is going to be OK,” Tarkanian said recently. “But what it did, it opened the door for them (the NCAA) to come in. They got all of our records. Our university has gone out and gotten all of our recruiting bills, everything. And when you go through all that stuff, there are going to be a few errors. Nothing major. We didn’t do anything major. But they’ll come up with something.

“You turn over all your telephone records, all your records of everything you’ve ever done, to anybody, they’ll find something somewhere. They’re going to find a recruiting visit where maybe a kid ate more than he should have eaten or something. We didn’t do anything major. But once you invite those guys (the NCAA) in, it’s like inviting the IRS.

” . . . They’re looking at every recruit since 1986. Every record since 1986. We’re going to be OK with recruits, too. . . . But I’m scared. Because of me, if something’s minor, by the time they (the NCAA) get done and the way they release it to the paper. . . . You know, they control the media. Like if a kid charged $24 instead of $20 (the maximum amount a school is allowed to spend per day to entertain a prospect during a recruiting visit), they’ll bring it out like he got extra money or something, and then that’s how the papers get it.”

The NCAA began chasing Tarkanian when he was building his powerhouse teams at Cal State Long Beach in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. By the time Long Beach was placed on probation in 1974, Tarkanian was coaching at UNLV, but the NCAA would catch up with him.

In 1977, the NCAA placed UNLV on probation with sanctions that included no appearances in postseason competition or on television for two years. The NCAA also ordered the university to “show cause” why it shouldn’t suspend Tarkanian for two years or be penalized further.

Of the 38 violations documented by the NCAA, 10 involved Tarkanian directly. The most serious dealt with Tarkanian’s role in trying to encourage a key source for the NCAA, a former UNLV player named Jeep Kelley, to lie to investigators about his dealings with UNLV.

Believing that the NCAA had used questionable tactics and that he had successfully refuted the charges against him, Tarkanian obtained court injunctions in Las Vegas against both the university and the NCAA that allowed him to continue coaching. The case--hinging on the question of whether the NCAA should be considered a governmental body whose actions must meet constitutional due process requirements--went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled, 5-4, in the NCAA’s favor in December of 1988.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision, Schultz said he believed that the NCAA Committee on Infractions probably would take some sort of action against the university instead of pushing for the suspension of Tarkanian as it did 13 years ago. When the Nevada Supreme Court, in a ruling last spring, ordered the lower court to lift Tarkanian’s injunction against the NCAA, the case inched closer to such a resolution.

But as the details that would settle the case are worked out, NCAA investigators look for fresh tracks.

UNLV’s recruitment of Daniels might, in large measure, come down to how the NCAA wants to interpret it.

UNLV Athletic Director Brad Rothermel has said he was informed through PCAA officials in August of 1986 that the NCAA would allow a university staff member to become the guardian for a potential student-athlete. Based on that discussion, in which no names were mentioned, Warkentien filed his petition to become Daniels’ legal guardian, Rothermel said. The petition received court approval that October.

Remarks about Daniels and UNLV by ESPN commentator Dick Vitale during a broadcast of a game between the University of Arizona and the Soviet national team a few weeks later raised such a stir, however, that Lew Cryer, then commissioner of the PCAA, urged Rothermel to contact the NCAA in writing and specifically mention Warkentien and Daniels. Rothermel did so and received a reply stating that, no matter how the court saw Warkentien’s relationship with Daniels, the relationship would not be exempt from NCAA recruiting rules.

By that time, Warkentien had already purchased an $1,800 motorcycle for Daniels to use while attending Mt. San Antonio College.

“They (the NCAA) have said we should have specifically identified the student-athlete involved,” Rothermel said recently. “And we didn’t. It would seem like it shouldn’t make any difference if your general question and your specific question are basically the same, but it may. That’s yet to be determined.”

While UNLV officials concede that the scope of the NCAA’s inquiry has gone far beyond UNLV’s recruitment of Daniels, they say they believe the inquiry is finding only minor infractions.

According to Rothermel, those infractions include “less than $500” in long-distance phone calls charged to the university by “a half dozen” UNLV players and cap-and-gown rental fees paid by Tarkanian’s wife, Lois, for five players who graduated in 1987.

The NCAA’s scrutiny of the school’s records recently found that nine players had failed to pay incidental charges at hotels where the team stayed on the road last year. The NCAA determined that the unpaid expenses violated its rules and ordered one-game suspensions for each of the players involved.

The NCAA has also been studying UNLV’s academic tutoring program for athletes, looking specifically at whether Daniels and other players received tutoring provided by the school before they enrolled. Under NCAA rules, a school may not pay educational expenses for an athlete before the athlete’s enrollment. “But I don’t think there are any major violations in that area,” Rothermel said.

The NCAA has, nevertheless, been dealing with allegations unrelated to Daniels that could lead to major violations.

Many of those allegations involve Ricky Collier, a former UNLV player from Riverside who befriended Daniels in Las Vegas.

Collier was quoted in the Newsday series as saying that, during his career at UNLV, he obtained cars at no charge from a Las Vegas auto rental agency owned by a UNLV booster, Norm Jenkins, and received free airline tickets for a girlfriend from a travel agency Jenkins owned at one time. Jenkins denied the charges.

In an interview with columnist John Henderson of the Las Vegas Review-Journal last May, Collier said he had been harassed and threatened because of his connection to the Daniels matter. “People say, ‘You could end up in the desert,’ ” Collier said.

In the interview with Henderson, Collier said he told the NCAA he lied to Newsday. Collier said in the interview that he had been upset with Tarkanian for not playing him more, but that he and Tarkanian had reached “an understanding.” Collier told Henderson: “I messed up, I’m very sorry, and it’ll never happen again.”

Collier, who could not be reached by The Times, currently is playing for a professional team in the Netherlands--an arrangement set up last September by Warkentien, according to Ray Paglia, Collier’s former roommate in Las Vegas. Warkentien is now an assistant to Rothermel.

According to sources familiar with the NCAA inquiry, who asked not to be identified, Collier has, in fact, stood by the story he gave Newsday in interviews with the NCAA and has further alleged that he received a large cash payment from a booster while attending UNLV.

Problems have arisen in finding corroboration for Collier’s information, however, the sources said. “Even people he said would help don’t help,” one source said.

The NCAA has also been frustrated in its attempts to talk to Daniels, who has played in the Continental Basketball Assn. and New Zealand and survived a drug-related shooting since leaving UNLV.

In a sworn statement, Daniels claimed he was contacted by an unidentified NCAA investigator last May when he was in a Queens hospital recovering from his gunshot wounds. Daniels claimed in the statement that the investigator offered him “an unspecified sum of cash to give evidence of possible recruiting violations by UNLV.” Daniels claimed he refused the money and told the investigator that he knew of no such violations.

In another sworn statement, Kevin Barry, the owner of a New York school bus company and Daniels’ former roommate, claimed that an NCAA investigator told him that he and Daniels would be “great American heroes” if they provided the NCAA with information damaging to Tarkanian and UNLV.

Barry said in an interview that he and Daniels provided the affidavits to “lawyers involved in the (UNLV) case.” Barry said he could not identify the lawyers. “Coach Tarkanian would know,” he said.

Tarkanian, however, said he has no connection to the affidavits. “The guy (Barry) called me and told me that they did it (made sworn statements),” he said. “Lloyd told a lot of people here (about the alleged bribe), but I have nothing to do with that. The one guy, Kevin Barry, called and told us that they (the NCAA) had been harassing him. But I’m not involved in that at all.”

David Berst, the NCAA’s assistant executive director for enforcement, said he was aware of the affidavits but declined to comment on them.

The NCAA’s tactics also were called into question last winter when investigator Robert Stroup went to a practice at Dixie College in St. George, Utah, to find Karl James, a point guard who played at UNLV during the 1987-88 season before transferring to Dixie.

Todd Street, a student manager for the Dixie basketball team at the time, later told Dixie Coach Ken Wagner, who was not at the practice, that Stroup had said he was there to “do an article” on James.

Wagner wrote the NCAA’s Schultz to tell him of the incident.

Wagner also told Tarkanian.

“He was a little ticked off,” Wagner said. “He said, ‘I’ll bet I can guess who (which investigator) it was.’ He said the name, and that’s who it was.”

Stroup referred all comment on the matter to Berst, who said: “Putting the best light on it, there may have been some form of miscommunication. If what they say is the truth, it may be a matter of somebody (Street) jumping to the conclusion that this guy (Stroup) was there to interview the player for a newspaper instead of interview him for another purpose.”

There is one factor that does make this bout with the NCAA a little different for UNLV: the presence of Maxson.

Hired as UNLV’s president in 1984, he has helped the school move away from its Blackjack U. image and become, as U.S. News and World Report put it last October, one of the “up-and-comers” among universities in the West.

Maxson’s public statements have been supportive of Tarkanian, but he has made it clear that basketball is not the university’s reason to exist.

Maxson talks with pride, for instance, about UNLV’s decision last fall not to admit Dedan Thomas, a point guard from Taft High School in Woodland Hills.

Thomas met NCAA admission standards under Proposition 48. But he failed to meet UNLV’s admission standards for out-of-state students, and the school’s admissions committee would not make an exception in his case. Thomas is currently playing at Antelope Valley College.

“He had an 800 on his boards (Scholastic Aptitude Test) but didn’t have the grade-point (average),” Maxson said. “There’s a feeling among faculty that, years ago, this person would be playing point guard for us right now.”

How will Maxson deal with the NCAA if its inquiry is upgraded to an official investigation, in which the school must answer to formal charges?

“If there are any allegations from the NCAA, we will take the allotted time we have to review those allegations,” he said. “Those that we don’t think are accurate we will contest. And I don’t mean in the courts. We’re not going back to court. We will contest those (allegations) before the NCAA Infractions Committee. . . . Any allegations made against the university that are proven, that are documented, we will accept the consequences and take whatever corrective action we can to make sure those things don’t happen again.”

In other words, in Maxson’s view, UNLV will go by the book--the NCAA manual.

How will Tarkanian deal with this?

“I’m hoping they’ll be fair with us,” he said of the NCAA. “That’s all. If they’re fair with us, they’re going to come up with three or four minor things, real minor things. If they’re fair with us. If they try to screw us, I don’t know what they’re going to do. You’re always scared.”