JaRon Rush served a suspension also for his role in a fraud case.(AP)

Piggie was a former Kansas City crack dealer turned summer basketball coach whose team boasted as many as five potential pros. Stanley was the rep with the rap, and the plan that was hatched that night was for Piggie to become wealthy acting as a middle man between professional interests and high school superstars such as Korleone Young, Jaron and Kareem Rush and Corey Maggette.

Within days, according to a federal indictment, Stanley gave Piggie $20,000, the first of numerous payments, under the premise that Piggie would kick some of it down to his players. When everyone went pro, Stanley would then represent them, and Piggie would be taken care of even more handsomely in the long run.

In the brief but intense run of Myron Piggie in the world of basketball, that was the lynchpin moment that eventually led to his downfall. It was capped Wednesday when he was sentenced to 37 months in federal prison for conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud and failure to file income taxes, part of a plea bargain of an 11-count indictment stemming from the $35,000-plus he paid his young players. He was also ordered to pay $320,000 in restitution to four colleges, the NCAA and Kansas City's Pembroke Hill High, from which the Rush brothers graduated.

JaRon Rush (UCLA), Kareem Rush (Missouri) and Andre Williams (Oklahoma State) all served NCAA suspensions during the 1999-2000 season for their role in the case. The NCAA has yet to decide on the Duke case, in which the Blue Devils could be forced to return all 1999 NCAA Tournament revenue and vacate their appearance in the 1999 national championship game for playing Maggette.

"Rather than showing them the right way -- hard work, setting goals, developing their talent -- your example was one of greed and opportunism," scolded U.S. District Judge Gary Fenner during the sentencing.

The plight of Piggie has turned into the most famous example of the wild underworld of amateur basketball, but he is hardly the only person being motivated by greed and opportunism. Piggie was merely a pawn in the middle of two spheres of power and potential -- professional sports agents, shoe companies and financial planners on one side, future multimillionaire teen athletes on the other.

And while the gatekeeper in Kansas City is now locked up, the world he tried to play so deftly continues here just before an NBA Draft of record youth and another intense summer of traveling team basketball.

"Every player has a pressure point," said Don Cronson, president of New York-based player agency The Cronson Team since 1971. "There is always a certain person or two who has the access and the influence over a player. That hasn't changed. Generally that has always been a family member and a coach. In the past, it has been a college coach. Now a lot of the power has shifted from the college coach to what I call 'the ministers without portfolio,' the summer guys, the AAU coaches. If you want to recruit a client, you still have to identify that pressure point person."

The mix between agents and summer coaches has grown so much that the NCAA launched a comprehensive investigation into the non-scholastic season last year and came up with a number of recommendations designed to move influence of players back into the high school season and, presumably, the high school coach. It has also considered pressuring the NBA and the players association to enact standards on agent dealings with high school players.

Elite players, eager to be seen by the college and professional scouts, have flocked to the crowded and competitive spring and summer circuit of traveling team basketball, fearing that not playing would limit their opportunities. In many cases, the summer game has become more important than high school basketball. And with traveling team coaches spending 24 hours a day with players during the summer, when a team can play 80 or 90 games, gaining influence over the talent is simple, even without paying them as Piggie did.

That's why agents and shoe companies work hard to build relationships with summer coaches and why someone who wants to make a buck, like Piggie, can find so many revenue streams from parties eager to exploit their relationship with young talent.

According to the federal indictment, Piggie, last employed as a janitor for the Kansas City (Mo.) school district, had worked a five-year, $425,000 consulting contract with Nike, drawn another $160,000 in expenses from the Swoosh and was given $184,435 in salary and expenses from Tom Grant II, a wealthy University of Kansas booster who officially owned Piggie's Children's Mercy Hospital 76ers. He was later given $49,900 in payments from Stanley and an undetermined amount of money from Detroit-based agent Kevin Poston.

And that was the late 1990s. Today, with as many as four high school players expected to be selected among the first six picks of the NBA Draft, the pressure to recruit young clients is even greater.

"To me," said Chicago-based agent Mark Bartlestein, "it's the dark side of the business. We don't deal with it at all. But a lot of people feel their entree to players is to hang out with AAU coaches and create relationships. To me, summer should be about kids playing basketball, getting better, enjoying themselves, not creating relationships. That should be further down the road. They are too young to be involved in this."

"In recent years there has been a lot of money in this," said Cronson. "You hear about it all the time. It's sophisticated."

Indeed, Piggie was only caught because his flamboyant ways attracted media attention and rival summer coaches' scorn. Within grassroots basketball, the 76ers were often derided as "Team Cash and Carry," and Piggie's close relationship with Nike hoops kingpin Raveling angered other coaches. On the same Las Vegas trip when he, Raveling and Stanley met, Piggie received a new set of gold-capped teeth from David Chapman, local dentist and booster of UNLV, which was recruiting Korleone Young at the time.

For his CMH 76ers, he recruited players from around the country. In addition to his stable of regulars, Mike Miller (Orlando Magic), Ajou Deng (Fairfield) and Ladarius Halton (Florida) all played for him at different times. Grant occasionally provided use of a private plane for the team.

All of that attracted the attention of then U.S. Attorney Stephen Hill, who made the groundbreaking decision to prosecute a case most often left to the NCAA.

But for the more professional of summer coaches and subtle of agents, things run way under the radar. Almost all major professional sports agency send someone to work summer tournaments and talent showcases such as the Nike All-American Camp or the Adidas ABCD Camp.

Some summer coaches, such as Thad Foucher, who ran the New Orleans Jazz for years and coached such players as Jonathan Bender, have even been hired full time by agencies, in this case Arn Tellum's SFX, Inc. out of Los Angeles, to use their connections with other coaches.

Wallace Prather, the coach of the Atlanta Celtics club team, who in recent years has had players such as Donnell Harvey and Kwame Brown, admits that a good relationship with him will help an agent's chances with one of his players. Prather says that the reason Harvey, who played a year at Florida before entering the NBA last June, signed with agent Dan Fagan was because of the relationship he and Fagan have.

"A lot (of agents) would call, but I'd only talk to Fagan," said Prather last summer. "I'm familiar with him. Donnell and I have a good relationship, I help him with some decisions. A lot of people would come at Donnell through me, because they understood that. They wanted me to funnel him to them."

Some go even further and find ways to cut the middleman, or summer coach, right out of the equation.

Bret Bearup, who runs the investment planning company ProTrust Capital out of Atlanta, is not technically an agent but has been on the receiving end of criticism from some college coaches for his relationships with players. He handles the investments of over 100 professional athletes and, like an agent, is constantly recruiting clients.

Most summers, his company sponsors a team of high school All-Americans, and potential clients, that travels to Europe and plays foreign competition. The trip violates no NCAA rules but clearly gives Bearup the much coveted access and influence. As an added bonus, Bearup often invites along a prominent traveling team coach.

"It's a chance to spend a couple weeks with some impressionable young men to learn a different culture and learn to appreciate something other than what they have," said Bearup, who played at Kentucky in the 1980s. "And it is a great vacation to me. To the extent that there may be some business to be gained for it, hey, that's a nice sidekick. I'll take that. But that's not the only reason I do it. It's not like I have to have the trip. I am comfortable with my motivation."

The trip has been so successful that Nike is in the planning stages of putting together its own summer European all-star team.

Which means that while Piggie sits in prison, the world he tried to rule is only getting more competitive and cutthroat.

"There is no question that's where this trend is going," said Bartlestein.

And the system that created Piggie isn't going away just because he is. Which is something Piggie's attorney, Kimberly Kellogg, argued at his sentencing, calling him "a scapegoat."

"There's talk of a lot of dollars floating around, and Myron didn't have it," she said.

Not anymore. Someone else does.