It’s been a strange time for Cardinals G.M. Steve Keim, with his name returning to the news for reasons unrelated to football. First, reports emerged regarding his connection to Mohamed Coulibaly, an alleged scam artist who was recently found dead in the swimming pool at his home. Second, former Cardinals receiver DeAndre Hopkins suggested that Keim was connected to a “set up” that triggered a positive PED test during Hopkins’s time in Arizona. (Keim strongly denies that claim.)
In an interview with Trey Wingo, Keim addressed his involvement with Coulibaly, and the allegations made by Hopkins.
“I want to clear my name and my family’s name, first and foremost,” Keim said. “I met Mohamed last July, late in July. He presented a drop-shipping business to me and my son. We invested in his company, then my ex-wife invested in his company. On paper, the rates of return were incredible for these stores. And e-commerce business is very lucrative if you do it the right way.
“As we continue on throughout the fall, I got to know him better and trusted him and ended up getting offered an opportunity to work with him. In turn, I ended up bringing anywhere from, well, eight friends of mine in to buy stores, and two of my family members: my ex-wife, and my son. And, after all that, Mohamed was paying people back, and it was business as usual, OK?”
Keim did not identify any of his “eight friends” who became caught up in Coulibaly’s alleged scam.
“But as we got into the spring, into March and April, people that I had involved with the company were coming to me that they weren’t getting payments,” Keim said. “I wasn’t getting paid back because of my seven stores that I bought. So things got extremely toxic. I got very, very animated with him and let him know that this is unacceptable. I flew to Philadelphia to meet with him to make sure that there are funds in his bank accounts to pay all these people that are not only involved with me, but he obviously had a number of other investors involved in this business. And long story short, you know, we were scammed. He ended up either getting murdered or killing himself, unfortunately. And it’s sad that the person loses his life, but the walls were closing in. And the problem is is he used me to essentially legitimize his business. And then, obviously, kept secrets and facts from me along the way, because, obviously, he knows that I wouldn’t support him if I knew that there was an issue or something illegal going on.”
Keim added that he has been interviewed by the FBI regarding the situation.
“Well, they told me that basically that I wasn’t a suspect or I wasn’t obviously anybody that was a concern,” Keim said. “They just wanted the facts. So I’m an open book. I have nothing to hide. I can provide anybody any information they need, whether it was text conversations, it was emails, it was contracts that were fabricated, I believe, on his end that made me believe in this business. And more than anything, the loss of sleep I have at night is not for me. It’s for the people who have been affected with this. And I humbly apologize to the eight friends and my two family members that were brought into this.”
Keim said that he and his family have incurred seven figures in losses that he hopes to recoup from what he believes was a Ponzi scheme.
“I don’t want to be the victim,” Keim said. “I want to be the guy who’s [saying] ‘I fucked up and I made a mistake.’ . . . I can look at the guy in the mirror as long as I can be honest with myself. And I made poor judgment, and I hurt some people along the way. I’m extremely sorry for it.”
Again, that’s Keim’s version. He was a victim. He’s not a suspect. Whether and to what extent these matters are investigated, and whether and to what extent Keim’s version is corroborated, remains to be seen.
It also remains to be seen whether authorities determine whether, as Keim said, Coulibaly was murdered or committed suicide as “the walls were closing in.”
