Report: AmeriLeague founder in Las Vegas is actually a convicted con man

Cerruti Brown, the founder of AmeriLeague, a fledgling pro basketball league that was scheduled to conduct its draft in Las Vegas on Thursday, is actually Glendon Alexander, a former McDonald's All-American-turned-conman who has multiple criminal convictions for fraud.

According to ESPN's Outside the Lines, Alexander told AmeriLeague operations manager Marcus Bass on Wednesday night that the Brown persona is fictitious.

"I talked to him, asked him, and he admitted he was Glendon Alexander," Bass told Outside the Lines. "He told me he was stepping away and to tell the staff that there'll be new ownership. I was in shock. I'm just hoping that all the people who have worked on this project can land on their feet."

Late Wednesday night, hours after Outside the Lines began questioning current and former league officials, the AmeriLeague website prominently displayed: "Cerruti Brown is Glendon Alexander. YEAH you should google GLENDON ALEXANDER, he is a con artist." It was later removed from the site, which wasn't functioning Thursday.

As Brown, Alexander had touted the league as an alternative to the NBA's D-League and promised salaries of up to $700,000 per year for former McDonald's All-Americans.

The AmeriLeague had announced the signings of several ex-NBA players, including Royce White, the 16th pick of the 2012 NBA draft, and was set to split up its 60 or so players among six teams in Thursday's draft. Several of the former NBA players signed by the AmeriLeague have since entered the D-League draft, which takes place Saturday.

According to the Dallas Morning News, Alexander was a North Texas prep basketball star at Carrollton Newman Smith in the 1990s and earned McDonald's All-America honors in 1996.

He began his college career at Arkansas, averaging 9.6 points per game as a freshman in 1996-97 for Nolan Richardson and the Razorbacks, before transferring to Oklahoma State after two seasons. He averaged 11.7 points for a Cowboys team that advanced to the Elite Eight.

It was during Alexander's time in Stillwater that he pulled a series of scams and con jobs, including stealing a scholarship check from a teammate, $46,500 from a Carrollton dentist and $150,000 in cash and jewelry from former Major League Baseball player Derek Bell.

In 2002, Alexander was convicted of bank and wire fraud for transferring more than $1.5 million from an adult-entertainment industry executive's account into his own. For that, he spent more than three years in the Seagoville (Texas) federal prison before getting released in October 2005.

A Dallas Morning News story in 2014 documented that Alexander was in charge of a prep school in Iowa, the ABCD Basketball Academy. One of the players' parents said she pulled her son because of "substandard housing, meals and basketball training."

According to the newspaper, she filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau in an effort to recoup some of the $4,000 she sent him.

As Brown, Alexander had claimed the AmeriLeague had investors, but shortly after its founding the league's president and commissioner resigned.

"Unless he has a body double, it's definitely him. No question about it," former league commissioner Ethan Norof told Outside the Lines on Wednesday after watching a Dallas Morning News video that accompanied the newspaper's Jan. 2014 report about Alexander, who said at the time, "All my con days, that's in the past."

Apparently, they weren't. Norof said he worked as commissioner for about a month and didn't receive a dime.

"Unless you count breakfast, I didn't get anything," said Norof, who left AmeriLeague in early October.

Bass told OTL that Thursday's draft would still be held at the league's Las Vegas offices despite the news about Alexander and the fact that one of the coaches resigned this week.

Joe Connelly, who was one of four coaches that included former NBA players Tree Rollins and Paul Mokeski, told OTL that he resigned Monday night after fearing Brown's identity was false.

"I got a tip. Then I started looking into it. There was no record of a Cerutti Brown anywhere. It's a fictitious person," Connelly said. "The sad part of all this is, there are guys who turned down jobs and are headed to Vegas right now. That's the part that bothers me. He's selling people dreams. It goes against everything I stand for and want to be associated with."