I am all for investing, but you have to be careful who and what you are dealing with. You have to be careful about who you trust.
When you are an NFL player, you may only get one HUGE contract that has to last you the rest of your life. You career if you are lucky will be over in your mid-30s, for most players it is early 20s or 30s. Don’t get swindled like Dashon Goldson.
The LV Sports Biz has the story.
Dashon Goldson is a 33-year-old former NFL All-Pro player with a reputation as a hard-hitting safety on the football field. The two-time Pro Bowler’s resume includes an All-Pro season with the San Francisco 49ers, with stops at the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Washington Redskins and Atlanta Falcons, his most recent team in 2016.
But in Las Vegas, Goldson is now known for something much different than his exploits on the football field. In this particular forum — the Eighth Judicial District Court in Las Vegas — Judge Susan Johnson entered a default judgment Tuesday against Goldson and two others previously for nearly $2 million as part of a deal gone bad related to the purchase of a well-known Las Vegas Boulevard strip club not too far from the Stratosphere in the city of Las Vegas.
For Goldson, it all began with someone telling him about a plan in early 2015 to buy the strip club that Las Vegans simply refer to as the “OG.” It involved the NFL player and a French businessman named Amadou Tall, who, two years earlier, had caught the attention of the NFL Players Association Security Department, which issued an “ALERT” about Tall in February 2013.
The NFL players union Alert was blunt about Tall: “The NFL Players Association Security Department received information alleging that Amadou Tall is operating a business named Invictus Executive Management Services LLC, also known as Invictusports.com. Mr. Tall is NOT an NFLPA certified Contract Advisor, nor is he an NFLPA Registered Financial Advisor. It has been alleged that Tall is actively advertising his business to NFL Players and his advertising may lead players to incorrectly believe that he is certified and/or registered with NFLPA.”
As soon as Goldson got this alert, he should have bailed out, but the lure of money and boobs was too much for him, and he continued.
The NFL even got involved to tell him he couldn’t own a strip club that had slot machines in it because of the league’s gambling policy.
Jorcin and Jauregui offered the NFL safety a 40 percent share in the business in exchange for Goldson giving $2.5 million toward the $12.5 million needed to buy the strip club and land. This was only two years after Goldson had signed a lucrative contract with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. In March 2013, Goldson signed a five-year, $41.25 million deal with the Bucs, with $22 million guaranteed.
Adolpho A. Birch III, NFL senior vice president of labor policy & government affairs, sent a “confidential” letter dated June 12, 2015 overnight to Las Vegas lawyer Vernon Nelson, representing the buyers of the OG.
“This letter confirms that Mr. Goldson would be in violation of League Policy if his group purchases the property and fails to remove the slot machines from the property. League Policy prohibits players from owning and/or operating any gambling-related enterprise — even when such ownership and/or operation is partial, indirect and/or through a business organization. Accordingly, should Mr. Goldson complete the purchase transaction, he should, at minimum, take immediate steps to terminate the establishment’s Space Lease Agreement in order to comply with League Policy.”
Once again, Goldson ignores this message and poured more money into the venture and ends up losing it all.
On top that now he owes a bunch of people.
Goldson had increased his equity investment to the OG purchase group called Sterling Entertainment Group LV, LLC to $16,080,000 with his membership percentage to 99.988, according to Tall’s sworn testimony in the Jan. 2016 affidavit.
The OG was shuttered in fall 2016 and has remained lifeless since. Since then, it has twice filed for bankruptcy. It first filed a Chapter 11 petition in July 2017, which was dismissed in February 2018. Then on March 20 just last week, it refiled for bankruptcy on the eve of a foreclosure sale to auction the strip club and the property it sits on.
Goldson poured $16 million into something that never made any more and now he owes over $2 million to his creditors. He is being forced to sell his house and other real estate to have money to live off of.
Another cautionary tale for athletes.