Golf coach under investigation for fraud

Two years ago I wrote an investigative piece on former University of Missouri- St. Louis golf coach Dustin Ashby.  During his tenure with UMSL, Ashby broke NCAA gambling rules while working as a part time, head men's golf coach when he hired three unnamed student-athletes to work for his company, Gridiron Fantasy Sports.  Click on this link for the story.

The Riverfront Times blog ran an article detailing Ashby's recent fraud investigation by the Missouri Attorney General's office here.

There are a few details of Ashby's business I remember when breaking the story for the The Current, UMSL's Student Newspaper.

As part of my reporting I tried calling and e-mailing Ashby's business and some of his associates several times.  The only response via e-mail I received was that he was no longer a public figure with UMSL.  After that e-mail a colleague and I drove to his office in Chesterfield, Missouri near the Chesterfield Airport.

The door to Ashby's Chesterfield office was locked and the windows were tinted so dark that my associate and I could not see inside.

A multi-million dollar gambling business, especially one featured on ESPN and in the Las Vegas gambling industry looked more like, both on paper and from closer inspection, a front for a poncy scheme.  At the time I was not privy to court documents or information regarding Ashby's financial records.  Without adequate, transparent information backed up by several sources I could not ask my editor (or any editor) to run a story regarding his businesses.

So when I read about the recent fraud investigation from the RFT blog I was not surprised.  I was also not surprised UMSL administrators tried to cover themselves after the NCAA sanctions.  While Ashby was the coach at UMSL his business was promising hundreds of thousands of dollars to would-be winners and holding drafts and other events in major Las Vegas hotels and casinos.

Discovering this information and the university's claims to the NCAA they did not know about Ashby's business seems far fetched, even for a starving and aspiring journalist like myself.

I'm sure the NCAA's investigation was thorough.  Ashby received a three-year show cause ban for lying and misleading investigators and UMSL athletics were placed on three years probation.  It's difficult for me to believe that when then UMSL athletic director Pat Dolan hired Ashby, a former UMSL student-athlete, they did not know he was running a multi-million dollar business, albeit an alleged poncy scheme.

UMSL has a long history of trying to get rid of supposed problems.  Look no further than this.