During a recent Gil’s Arena episode, former NBA guard Rashad McCants retold the story of how fraudster Peggy Ann Fulford stole all his money.
Here’s a more in-depth look into what happened from this 2019 Sports Illustrated piece.
(via Alex Prewitt/Sports Illustrated):
On the morning he learned his bank account had been drained, Rashad McCants couldn’t afford doughnuts. As a rookie at Timberwolves training camp in the fall of 2005 it was his duty to snag a couple boxes of breakfast treats before practice, as assigned by the team’s unquestioned alpha, Kevin Garnett. So when the 21-year-old guard reported to the locker room empty-handed—unable to cover even a single cruller—he got blasted with a KG earful. “No way you don’t have money,” McCants recalls Garnett barking. “I’m not trying to hear that s—!”
McCants was baffled too. Six months after leading North Carolina to the NCAA title as a junior and declaring for the NBA draft, at which the T-Wolves took him at No. 14, he’d just received the first check from his $1.54 million rookie deal. Even after some admittedly lavish splurges, though—a Range Rover, a $5,000 Brioni suit and various Louis Vuitton items—he knew there was no chance he’d already blown through six figures.
The rookie’s financial hit would be softened when Garnett wired him $10,000 to cover expenses until the next payday, but McCants still remembers the wrenching realization that came when his agent confirmed the disappearance of more than $200,000, with only one plausible explanation for where it could’ve gone. It’s the same gut punch that would be felt over the next decade by doctors, lawyers, at least four other athletes and one aerospace engineer, all of them ensnared in the same tangled criminal saga that would stretch from Texas to Florida, Saudi Arabia to North Korea.
“I was like, ‘Peggy?’” McCants says. “‘What? How?’”
