Sports often has an “all’s fair” feeling to it, which is fine unless the things regarded as fair among teams violate federal law.
Former St. Louis Cardinals scouting director Chris Correa received a 46-month prison sentence for access the Houston Astros’ computer system because Correa suspected that the Astros had obtained proprietary information from the Cardinals.
As explained after news of the investigation first emerged in 2015, the NFL should be concerned that, at some point, an ambitious and creative prosecutor will start poking around the business of a team or the league office itself, convene a grand jury, and start indicting ham sandwiches.
“Behind every great fortune there is a crime,” declares the prefatory quote from Honoré de Balzac in The Godfather. Multiple team owners in recent years have faced issues of criminal or civil liability in non-football businesses. If the Justice Department were to scrutinize with the full reach of the U.S. Code the activities of the NFL or one or more of its teams or executives, what would it find?
It’s something that the league and the teams should worry about. Plenty of prosecutions arise not because somebody did something that obviously was illegal when it was done, but because the conduct violated legal principles about which the person wasn’t aware. For the lawyers handling the business of the league and its teams, it’s critical to identify every potential hotspot and ensure that people know where the line is -- and to urge them to stay away from it.
Here’s the first one, free of charge: All employees who have changed teams should at all times resist using unchanged passwords to get inside their former employers’ computer systems. For the rest, you’re on your own.
