After Miami probe, NCAA makes enforcement-staff changes

INDIANAPOLIS - The NCAA's home-grown scandal is hitting hard at headquarters.

President Mark Emmert said Monday that Julie Roe Lach, the vice president of enforcement, is leaving and soon will be replaced by private attorney Jonathan Duncan because of her role in the botched investigation at the University of Miami.

Emmert even suggested that the NCAA's board of directors and executive committee could hold him accountable for this mess, and it's not over yet.

After releasing a 55-page report detailing how the NCAA violated its own practices and policies by paying thousands of dollars to the attorney for convicted Ponzi-schemer Nevin Shapiro to help with the Miami case, Emmert spent more than an hour doing damage control.

"I think the damage is, first of all, for those people who were already skeptical or cynics - this feeds into their cynicism," Emmert told the Associated Press after a conference call with other reporters. "For those of us who have great confidence in all the people around this building, it's painful to have to deal with an issue that fails to live up to our standards and expectations."

The report, written by attorney Kenneth L. Wainstein, details how now-former NCAA investigator Ameen Najjar appeared to manipulate the process by hiring Maria Elena Perez, Shapiro's attorney, to help the NCAA obtain information from a bankruptcy proceeding - information that otherwise would have been unavailable. Shapiro has said that it provided improper benefits to dozens of football and basketball players at Miami.

According to the report, Lach obtained clearance for paying Perez, but the NCAA's legal staff nixed the idea. Najjar then contacted Perez himself with what the report describes as a "way around" the road block.

The report said Najjar, who left the NCAA last spring, assured Lach and Tom Hosty, the managing director of enforcement, that the legal staff had approved the deal when it had not. Najjar did not return phone messages Monday night.

The NCAA didn't figure out what happened, the report said, until Perez billed the organization $57,115 for hours in August. By that time, the NCAA already had paid about $10,500 to Perez in expenses.

Wainstein called Lach cooperative and said nothing the external investigators found called her integrity into question. Lach did not immediately respond to a message left by the Associated Press on her cell phone.

"The actions we are taking today are clearly consistent with holding people accountable for their behavior," Emmert said. "If the executive committee believes some disciplinary action needs to be taken toward me, then I'm sure they will."

The incident has been an embarrassing blow to the NCAA, which is fending off a number of lawsuits and is the target of sharp criticism in some quarters for the penalties it imposed on Penn State after the Jerry Sandusky child sex-abuse scandal. Wainstein now will embark on the second part of the investigation, which could include looking into previous NCAA infractions cases.