Who is Korleone?
June 11, 2008 @ 9:25 a.m. by Joannaby joanna
I committed a journalistic mistake on a previous comment — not a post, a comment. I wrote simply the person’s first name, and sure enough, there’s someone who doesn’t know that person. That’s my fault for figuring that everyone would. So here’s some background.
Korleone is Korleone Young, who played basketball at East High. I covered him my first year here when he was a junior during the 1996-97 season. He was a major stud. He played three years at East (he went to Hargrave Military his senior year) and is No. 5 on the City League’s career scoring list with 1,357 points. He led the league in scoring his sophomore and junior years.
I’m sure anyone who saw him would say he was a monster on the court and so much fun to watch.
Korleone was drafted out of high school in the second round but didn’t stick. I think most would have agreed back then that he needed a couple years of college. But he had some bad influences around him, particularly Myron Piggie, his AAU coach, who paid players like Korleone and Jaron Rush, Corey Magette and Kareem Rush.
Here’s part of a story we ran in 2001 on Piggie: An amateur basketball coach who admitted that he gave money to high school basketball stars, including Wichitan Korleone Young, was sentenced to more than three years in prison Wednesday and ordered to pay more than $320,000 in restitution.
Myron Piggie was sentenced to 37 months on one felony count of conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud, and one year on a misdemeanor count of failure to file income taxes. The sentences were to run concurrently, with no chance of parole.
He was ordered to pay restitution of $256,617 to four universities, the NCAA and Pembroke Hill High, the private Kansas City prep school attended by two of the players Piggie was accused of paying, brothers JaRon and Kareem Rush. JaRon played for UCLA and left early for the NBA but was undrafted. Kareem still plays at Missouri.
Piggie also must pay $67,662 to the Internal Revenue Service. Under a plea agreement, 10 other charges against Piggie were dismissed.
Piggie had admitted in May 2000 that he schemed to defraud UCLA, Duke, Missouri and Oklahoma State, their conferences and the NCAA by making payments to high school stars who played for him in summer league games. In his guilty pleas, Piggie acknowledged conspiring to defraud the universities of their right to award scholarships to eligible amateur athletes. Had the players acknowledged the payments, they would not have been eligible for college athletics.
June 11th, 2008 at 8:09 pm
A great player who just got led in the wrong direction. Wished he would have stayed at East, would have been fun to watch him his senior year.
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