The Rick Pitino extortion case is a glorious train wreck of moral depravity

The Rick Pitino extortion case is as good as it gets in a tabloid crazy nation like ours.  Here’s the background:

In August of 2003, Pitino met a batshit nuts chick named Karen Cunagin at Porcini, an Italian restaurant in Louisville’s Crescent Hill neighborhood.  The owner gave Pitino the building keys near closing time and left the pair alone.  The two then had sex at a table near the bar, which was verified by statements that both Pitino and Cunagin gave to Louisville police later on.

That must have resulted in one hell of an interesting cleanup for Porcini’s busboy.  “Hey boss, there’s something in this booth, but it ain’t marinara sauce.  Did you put Chicken Marsala back on the menu?”

A few weeks later, Cunagin called Pitino and told him she was pregnant and that the father was a noted basketball coach with a national title on his resume, and that she’d had sex with this person in a Italian restaurant.  The conversation that followed may or may not have gone something like this:

Pitino: Please tell me Bobby Knight nailed you at an Olive Garden.

Cunagin: Uh, no Rick, I’ve never sedu…uh, I mean, I’ve never met Bobby Knight.

Pitino: DAMN! What about Coach K, did you recently have a quicky with him at a Pizza Hut?

Cunagin: Pizza Hut?!?  What kind of whore do you think I am?  No, I’ve never met Coack K either.  It’s you, Rick, that night at Porcini.

Pitino: DAMN!

After that, things got even more tabloidy for Pitino, I’ll let the AP provide the quick and dirty recap:

Pitino said Sypher told him she was going to have an abortion but didn’t have health insurance, so he gave her $3,000 to have the procedure done in Cincinnati, according to the report.

Pitino, a prominent Roman Catholic, contended when the case came to light last year that he wanted Sypher to use the money for insurance, not an abortion.

Over the next six years, she married Pitino’s longtime assistant, Tim Sypher, and the two have a daughter. The Syphers separated after the Pitino affair came to light and divorce proceedings are pending. (AP via Boston Herald)

That’s right, Cunagin friggin’ married Pitino’s basketball equipment manager, Tim Sypher (thus the name change).  This chick is a special kind of crazy…but it gets better.

In April of 2009, Pitino reported that he had contacted the FBI regarding an extortion attempt made against him.  The extorter?  Oh yeah, Karen Sypher.  A week after the revelation became public, ESPN’s Pat Forde dug into the story and came up with this:

Multiple people were said to be calling the coach on behalf of Karen Sypher, sources said. She denies having encouraged anyone to harass Pitino, and denies having any knowledge of those calls before being asked about them by the authorities.

Judy Cunigan said she called and talked to Pitino once herself about three weeks ago, “to ask him what has happened to my daughter.” Cunigan said she got Pitino’s number from her daughter. Judy Cunigan said Tim Sypher came by her house the night she placed that call, pounded on the door and, after being let in, told her not to do it again.

“Now they’ve got it going around that I asked for millions of dollars,” Cunigan said. “We haven’t asked for anything but the truth.”

Judy Cunigan said other calls were made by a family friend she only identified as “Lester.” She said that to her knowledge, Lester never threatened Pitino but only encouraged him to do right by Karen.

Karen Sypher said that if Lester called Pitino, she didn’t know how he got the coach’s unlisted number. She said the only way she suspected that he had placed any phone calls to Pitino was when the FBI played an audio recording of a call over and over, and she believed the voice to be Lester’s. (ESPN.com)

As it turns out, the “Lester” placing the calls was Lester Goetzinger, a longtime friend of Sypher’s.  And how did he get Pitino’s number?  Sypher had sex with him, and in return Goetzinger called up Pitino in February of 2009 threatening to tell the public that the coach had raped Sypher.

After sexing up Goetzinger to get what she wanted, Sypher proceeded to sex up attorney Dana Kolter, who then signed a joint letter with her demanding money from Pitino and threatening to file suit over that romp in Porcini’s back in 2003.

While she was busy mounting half the guys in Louisville to help move her plot along, she got her husband Tim to take a written list of her demands to Pitino.  That list included college tuition for her children, a couple of cars, money to pay off her mortgage and $3,000 per month.

With his hand forced, Pitino basically had no choice but to notify the authorities that he nailed a crazy chick in an Italian restaurant six years ago, paid for her abortion and then watched in horror as she married a member of his staff.  After all that, she was now trying to extort money from him.

In retaliation, Sypher filed a report with the Louisville police department in June of 2009 saying Pitino had raped her in 2003.  Apparently she didn’t get the opportunity to sleep with a police captain in exchange for having him go over to Pitino’s house and arrest him in front of his family.

That’s your recap, and the trial itself started yesterday.  I’ll let Andrew Wolfson of the Louisville Courier-Journal fill in some of the particulars about it:

But Assistant U.S. Attorneys John E. Kuhn Jr. and Marisa Ford have amassed more than 5,000 pages of evidence with which they’ll try to prove that Sypher — then married to Tim Sypher, Pitino’s equipment manager — made “threatening communications with intent to extort,” lied about it to the government and retaliated against Pitino for reporting the alleged extortion.

The charges carry a combined maximum sentence of 26 years, although under federal sentencing guidelines, Karen Sypher would, if convicted, more likely face seven to eight years behind bars.

The government’s witnesses in the two-week trial will include Pitino, who may testify as soon as Tuesday.  Spokesmen for U of L President James Ramsey and Athletic Director Tom Jurich, who have stood by Pitino, despite a clause in his contract that allows him to be fired for acts of “moral depravity,” declined to comment on the trial. (Louisville Courier-Journal)

I’m fascinated by this whole affair partly because there’s not a sympathetic figure to be found in this train wreck.  Everyone involved is coming off like a slimeball, including the administration at Louisville.  What more does a coach have to do to break a moral depravity clause in a contract?   Get caught running a dog fighting ring?

By retaining Pitino, you give opposing coaches like John Calipari (who’s no saint himself) all the ammo they need to recruit against your institution.  “Hi (insert name of blue chip recruit), this is Coach Calipari calling from Kentucky.  I heard you’re considering Louisville.  By the way, you been keeping track of this Karen Sypher case?  No?  Well then, let me fill you in…”

We’ll see what happens when Pitino takes the stand today or tomorrow.  Sypher’s lawyer James Earhart (hey, an attorney, they’re the biggest slimeballs of all!) will ask undoubtedly Pitino about the following:

Earhart said Sypher didn’t call the police after leaving Porcini because she didn’t think anyone would believe her. After telling Pitino she was pregnant, the coach made a veiled death threat, Earhart said.

“He makes a suggestion of something having to do with concrete shoes and a river if this matter can’t be resolved,” Earhart said. (AP via SI.com)

With Sypher’s track record, I highly doubt that this allegation is true, but it would have been sorta cool if it was.  And it would have gotten that much better if Sypher had pulled an Oksana Griogorieva and taped it.  In such a scenario, would Rick Pitino then be considered morally depraved by the powers that be at Louisville?  Who knows.

All things considered, has Rick Pitino been a failure at Louisville?