Game changer

— -- ON THE EVE of the landmark O'Bannon v. NCAA trial, Michael Hausfeld, the lead attorney for former UCLA basketball star Ed O'Bannon, huddled with his colleagues in a small conference room overlooking Oakland's Lake Merritt. The words "WAR ROOM" were written on a Post-it note attached to the doorframe. Around a lacquered table, a half-dozen lawyers and economists stared into laptops save for Hausfeld, who, at 68, still takes handwritten notes, peering through his round, wire-rimmed glasses like a courtly scrivener.

The O'Bannon case boils down to the question of whether the NCAA can legally prevent athletes from earning money on their names and identities, which are plastered on everything from video games to jerseys to ESPN Classic broadcasts. Andy Schwarz, a sports economist who has been picking apart the NCAA for over a decade, brought up Johnny Manziel and Jadeveon Clowney, who would have been multimillionaires years ago if not for the NCAA restrictions.

"You're going to have to help me out there," Hausfeld told Schwarz, sheepishly, "because I don't know who those people are."

Hausfeld wasn't kidding: He had no clue who Manziel and Clowney were. Just as he had no clue who O'Bannon -- the Final Four Most Outstanding Player of UCLA's 1995 title run -- was before O'Bannon agreed to place his name on the lawsuit five years ago. No clue who Oscar Robertson was before he was added as co-plaintiff. No clue about anything, really, related to sports, at least as it's played between the lines.

But Hausfeld does have one big idea -- that the people who run our games ought to play by the rules that govern society and industry -- and that has made him one of the most powerful people in sports. He has gone after the NCAA for allegedly operating as an illegal cartel. He has pursued the NFL, pushing the league to address the treatment of players in the areas of concussions and licensing rights. He's even brought heat on the National Federation of State High School Associations in an attempt to hold some entity accountable for the fact that prep football players are nearly twice as likely as college players to suffer a brain injury.

In the coming weeks, a judge will rule on the O'Bannon case, the greatest challenge to the NCAA's economic model in its 108-year history. Hanging in the balance is not just the battered ideal of amateurism -- and who gets access to the billions of dollars flowing through college sports -- but what the entertainment product fans consume will look like in the near future. Even a limited injunction could allow the next Manziel to sell his autograph without touching off a national scandal.

"A favorable ruling," Schwarz says, "will expose to the world that the emperor has no clothes."

Hausfeld is hardly the only class-action lawyer descending on sports: There are at least 350 cases pending in federal court against the NFL, the NCAA and the major athletic conferences, according to an analysis by "Outside the Lines," in what has become an industrywide attack over issues ranging from concussions to the distribution of prescription drugs by the NFL. The wave of litigation already has helped change how football -- from the NFL to Pop Warner -- deals with head injuries and has triggered a spate of reform proposals within the NCAA.

But among the hundreds of lawyers seeking to capitalize on the recent frenzy, Hausfeld is, in many ways, the most controversial. A small, balding man who wears bowties and talks so softly his wife says she feels like a "lip reader" at the dinner table, he nonetheless has participated in a disproportionate number of legal knife fights; after 37 years, he was fired from his previous firm via a note left on his chair. Hausfeld is perhaps best described as a legal activist. In 1998, he wrested $1.25 billion from Swiss banks on behalf of Holocaust survivors seeking to reclaim their dormant assets. Hausfeld doesn't go as far as to compare NFL linemen with concentration camp victims, but he does frame the cases in the same way. "There is no comparison in terms of the gravity of the evil," he says. "What you need to do is disconnect the gravity of the evil but still look at the magnitude or the systemic nature of the wrong."

Hausfeld has gained a following among some athletes and reformers as the man who can end the exploitation. "He kind of brings that David versus Goliath thing," O'Bannon says. But it hasn't always worked out that way. One group of NFL greats believes Hausfeld drew them in with promises of taking on the NFL in the same way he once took on Texaco and Exxon, only to sell them out.

"I thought he was sent from God to help us," said Joe DeLamielleure, the Hall of Fame Buffalo Bills offensive lineman and one of Hausfeld's former clients. "Then I realized he was the devil."

ALL THE PEOPLE who know Hausfeld -- his friends, current and former colleagues, even his wife, Marilyn -- shake their heads in amazement at the idea of him presiding over some of the most momentous sports cases in history. Sports is essentially a foreign language to him. At one point during the O'Bannon trial, Hausfeld referred to the Nike swoosh as a "swish," then attributed the famous logo to Adidas. "When did they change the swish to stripes?" he asked his paralegal, Jim Mitchell. A few years ago, Hausfeld's associates bought him a copy of "Football for Dummies" while Mitchell gave him Football 101 classes on everything from how the draft works to the history of the collective bargaining agreement. "He's come really far: I mean, when I first started working for him I don't think he knew what a touchdown was," said Swathi Bojedla, a 28-year-old associate in Hausfeld's firm. Bojedla, who grew up in Buffalo and still has Bills season tickets, says she frequently finds herself sprinting down the hall with Wikipedia bios to give to her boss when another famous potential client calls.

"Who's Oscar Robertson?" Hausfeld asked Bill Isaacson, a prominent antitrust lawyer involved in the O'Bannon case, one afternoon.

"Michael, he's an incredibly big deal!" Isaacson replied.

Hausfeld takes the ribbing good-naturedly and acknowledges that he knows next to nothing about sports. He says he thinks it might actually help him relate to his famous clients. "It adds to the relationship because they know I'm not responding to them out of sports admiration, I'm responding to them as a person," he says.

Hausfeld was raised in Brooklyn; his father sold material to furriers out of a small shop. Walter Hausfeld had grown up in Poland. Shortly after Germany invaded in 1939, Walter and his brother Meyer fled to New York to join two other brothers who had urged the family to escape. A fifth brother stayed behind. When the Nazis arrived in the Hausfelds' hometown, they liquidated the Jewish population. The brother who had remained behind was marched into the forest and shot. Hausfeld is named after that late uncle, Michael David Hausfeld.

In the early 1970s, Hausfeld met his mentor: Jerry Cohen, a muckraking class-action lawyer who had been chief counsel to the Senate antitrust subcommittee and represented the United Farm Workers. "It was like a father-son relationship," said Marilyn Hausfeld, an actress and singer who met her husband at Brooklyn College. Cohen harbored a suspicion of big business. His 1971 book "America Inc." argued that the growing concentration of economic power was dangerous to society. Ralph Nader wrote the introduction. Cohen "always encouraged me to take the cases that I was most interested in on a social basis," Hausfeld said, "and he always supported me in doing them despite opposition in the firm and whether it made economic sense or not."

Hausfeld stayed at the firm for 37 years, becoming a partner and chairman with a significant equity stake. "Michael was looked at as this absolutely creative, independent-minded genius who would pursue cases that others couldn't identify and then run with them," said Steven Toll, the firm's managing partner. "We looked at ourselves as the white hats -- individuals against corporate misconduct and greed."

Hausfeld initially took on the Swiss banks pro bono; invoking international law and even the Nuremberg trials, he won a $1.25 billion settlement on a lawsuit involving incidents that had taken place in Europe 50 years earlier. Hausfeld won a $176 million judgment for African-American employees who accused Texaco of discrimination and, after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, represented Alaska Natives who sometimes paid him in salmon.

But in addition to his gift for making implausible cases real, Hausfeld's style sometimes grated on those around him. Some colleagues viewed him as imperious and condescending. He frequently fought with lawyers ostensibly on the same side he was. He launched projects over the objections of his partners. In the mid-2000s, Hausfeld made it known that he wanted to open a London office. Europe had little experience with class-action litigation, and his ambitious project aimed to expand European law. It was a classic clash between Hausfeld's visionary impulses and the practicalities of running a law practice.

To some, the London project came to symbolize what they saw as Hausfeld's attempt to take total control over the firm. It eventually ripped the firm apart.

For months in 2008, Hausfeld and his partners rarely spoke even though they sat within a few feet of one another. "The tension inside the office became unbearable," Toll said. One afternoon, with Hausfeld present, the firm's compensation committee voted to reduce his stake. Almost immediately, Hausfeld's opponents used their new majority to fire him.

The partners dispatched a delegate to give Hausfeld notice he'd been ousted. Hausfeld was away at a settlement conference, and when he returned he found the notice on his chair.

"I was to leave the building immediately," Hausfeld said. "I was to take nothing with me. If I was caught on the premises, they would have me arrested as a trespasser."

Toll said the partners wanted to move quickly. Hausfeld is such a good lawyer, he said, the partners feared he'd find a creative way out.

HAUSFELD'S ENTRY INTO sports immediately followed that professional debacle. The day after he was fired, he set up a new firm in borrowed office space, along with a dozen lawyers and two assistants who had followed him out the door.

One day he received a call from Ken Feinberg, a prominent lawyer who handled the claims for the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks. Feinberg had served as a mediator on some of Hausfeld's cases. He mentioned Sonny Vaccaro, the street-wise former marketing executive who once shod young basketball players for Nike (and, later, Adidas and Reebok). Vaccaro, as much as anyone, built the empire of camps, tournaments and sneakers that still drives millions of dollars to coaches and universities. He had come to see the NCAA as an exploitative cesspool. By 2008, Vaccaro was touring the country as a reformer, denouncing the NCAA as "the worst organization in the world."

"I Googled him and saw who he had gone after: Nazi Germany and the Swiss banks! Apartheid!" Vaccaro says. "His cases were unbelievable." Vaccaro flew to Washington to meet Hausfeld in his K Street office. "He walks in and he's this little meek guy with a bowtie, 5-6, maybe 145 pounds, very soft-spoken," Vaccaro says. "You wouldn't think there was any energy there. Until we started talking." For the next hour, Vaccaro described his personal journey. When he finished, Hausfeld walked over and threw his arms around him.

"Let's go after them," Hausfeld said, according to Vaccaro.

Hausfeld says he took on the case "because it was right." But it was also a business opportunity his new firm desperately needed. The potential financial payoff for the firm was unclear. "But it was an opportunity for us to say, 'We're still here, and we're doing bigger and better things,'" says Jon King, a lawyer and former walk-on basketball player at Santa Clara who followed Hausfeld to his new firm.

King, who became the lead investigator on the case, said that at the time the firm had no ambitions to expand into sports law. But the NCAA seemed ripe for a challenge. Much of the case was sitting in plain sight. Vaccaro showed Hausfeld the obscure 1997 autobiography of Walter Byers, the NCAA's executive director from 1951 to 1988. Byers was astonishingly repentant: His book, "Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletes," asserts that, with his help, the NCAA erected a "nationwide money-laundering scheme" that enriches conferences, schools, coaches and TV networks on the backs of unpaid athletes. Byers confessed that he helped invent the term "student-athlete" to shield the NCAA from having to pay the players.

To Hausfeld, the book was "an amazing revelation" that helped to convince him he had a case. He found that other economists had reached the same conclusions about the NCAA. Two years after the publication of Byers' book, a former Berkeley economics professor named Ernie Nadel was watching a bowl game when an announcer mentioned that Florida coach Steve Spurrier earned $2 million a year. Nadel approached one of his colleagues, Dan Rascher and asked how it could be that the head football coach for a public university was making so much money.

"Because he's good at recruiting talent," Rascher said. "And you can't pay the talent."

"This is legal?" Nadel responded.

That inquiry ultimately led to one of the first class-action antitrust cases against the NCAA. Rascher and fellow economist Schwarz hoped the case would go to trial. But in 2008, attorneys accepted a $10 million settlement from the NCAA for "bona fide educational expenses" to be distributed to some 12,000 athletes over a three-year period. The lawyers made almost as much money. The NCAA emerged unscathed. Schwarz and Rascher were furious. Hausfeld, who hired them as expert witnesses, gave their cause new life.

All Hausfeld needed was a name to attach to the case.

"After the hug, that's when I had to go out and find people," Vaccaro says.

Over the next two months, he called up nearly a dozen prominent players, trying to persuade one to take on the NCAA. None would agree. Then one day, O'Bannon called him. He explained to Vaccaro how a friend had asked him one day, "Want to see yourself in a video game?" The game featured a UCLA power forward with O'Bannon's height, weight, skin tone, No. 31 and left-handed shot. He even had the player's bald head.

O'Bannon wondered how it was possible that he wasn't getting paid. Vaccaro put him in touch with Hausfeld, whose lack of sports knowledge did not bother O'Bannon. "I can appreciate someone who is of a certain cause, not a fan but someone who realizes right is right and wrong is wrong," he says. Ramogi Huma, who has led the recent campaign to unionize college athletes, says Hausfeld is "always on the right side, always fighting for the little guy."

During a bruising deposition in 2012, an NCAA attorney asked Vaccaro whether he had a criminal record. Hausfeld halted the proceedings and accused the NCAA of acting like a state police agency. He asked the lawyer whether he had a criminal record.

"Have you? Now you answer," Hausfeld insisted. "It's your turn."

Vaccaro says the retort gave him confidence to proceed, knowing Hausfeld had his back. "Michael is like that guy in the Jimmy Stewart story ["It's a Wonderful Life"], that angel looking over me."

IN 2011, HAUSFELD found a new cause: retired NFL players.

Their plight immediately resonated with him. Many of the retirees lacked health insurance, and, for those who played in the 1970s and 1980s, when the NFL was transforming into a $10 billion industry, their pensions were low relative to other major sports leagues. There was growing scientific evidence that football-related head trauma was causing brain damage in an alarming number of players, but the NFL had spent years rejecting the findings. That year, as a lockout paralyzed the sport, Hausfeld filed a lawsuit on behalf of former Vikings defensive end Carl Eller and other players to try to gain a foothold in the labor talks.

The effort failed. Hausfeld spent hours sitting outside the negotiating room while the NFL and the current players settled on an agreement widely viewed as a victory for the owners, a loss for the current players and troubling for the retirees. Hausfeld soon filed another lawsuit -- Eller II -- this time against the NFL Players Association. That effort also failed, but Hausfeld says the process gave him insight into the NFL's "victimization" of the older players.

Desperate to be heard, the retirees focused on a lawsuit that had been filed in Minnesota. Six former players, including former Rams defensive end Fred Dryer, Hall of Fame Oilers defensive end Elvin Bethea and Oilers quarterback Dan Pastorini, argued that the NFL had illegally appropriated their identities to promote the league through its lucrative production arm, NFL Films. The league "trades on the 'glory days' of the NFL as a marketing and advertising technique to enhance the NFL's brand awareness and increase its revenue," the suit alleged. "The retired players who created these glory days, however, have gone almost completely uncompensated for this use of their identities."

The lawsuit encapsulated all the bitterness that had built up among the retirees.

"We considered ourselves to be cattle back in the day," said Bethea, who made the Pro Bowl eight of his 16 seasons. "And when it's over, it's over." Upon his retirement, Bethea found he no longer had health insurance. Although his legacy lived on in numerous NFL films, he didn't see a dime. Bethea, who remained in Houston, picked up a decent paycheck, medical insurance and a pension working 27 years for Anheuser-Busch. The difference between how a beer company and the National Football League treated him always struck him as "LAUGHABLE, in capital letters," he says.

Bethea had a friend, singer Betty Wright, who told him about the "mailbox money" she occasionally received, song royalties for which "you sit there and wait for the money to come your way."

"I guess the mailman forgot me," Bethea said.

One day he was coaching Pee Wee football when a player told him, "Hey, Coach Bethea, I saw you on TV!" That's when he decided to take action. "I just thought this was not the American way," Bethea said. "If you do something, you ought to get paid. I felt like I was an entertainer, like a songwriter or a singer or a movie actor -- anyone who has performed in front of other people. That's why I got involved."

Hausfeld wasn't originally involved in the suit. He was brought in by another lawyer, Bob Stein, a former NFL linebacker who later ran the Minnesota Timberwolves, in part because Hausfeld was representing O'Bannon over the same issues. Hausfeld positioned himself to the retirees as their champion. To win their support, he courted DeLamielleure, the popular former Bills guard who had been fighting the NFL over medical benefits and pensions for years. Joe D, as he's known, is mostly deaf in his left ear -- from being head-slapped for 13 seasons, he believes. He helps raise money for an orphanage in Mexico. DeLamielleure was impressed by Hausfeld's soft-spokenness and stated dedication to their cause. At one of the first meetings with the players, "He brought his grandson," he recalls. "I was impressed. I'm a real family guy, and that's how he won me over."

But, almost immediately, Hausfeld, over the objections of the original plaintiffs, worked to cut a deal with the NFL. The $50 million settlement called for no direct payment to the thousands of retired NFL players who would be affected. Nor did it provide insurance, which, according to DeLamielleure, was "the only thing we really wanted." Most of the money went to a "Common Good Fund," which Hausfeld says could ultimately be used to provide health benefits to some players. The deal also created a licensing agency that Hausfeld set up with IMG, the marketing giant, to cut deals on behalf of NFL retirees.

The aging players, most of whom had little or no name recognition, thought that the licensing agency was worthless and they would see little, if any, of the settlement money. The lawyers, meanwhile, were to receive most of $8 million set aside to cover legal fees and the establishment of a trust for players. Stein and the original plaintiffs were livid. They told Hausfeld they wouldn't support the deal. "He couldn't convince us it was a fair deal, so he got other people," said Pastorini, who filed a malpractice suit against Hausfeld that was later dismissed. "He basically dropped us and abandoned us." Hausfeld insists that he consulted with Stein and the original plaintiffs. He says he believed that it was the best deal he could get and that it set up a vehicle for them to get paid. "It was clearly a difference of opinion as to what they considered successful and what we felt was successful and achievable," he says.

Hausfeld also went after the NFL players' union, another act that led to recriminations. In June 2012, he sent a letter to the AFL-CIO "on behalf of the undersigned," calling on the umbrella federation for U.S. unions to "expel the NFL Players Association ... for its moral failures." The "undersigned" included Bethea, but when the letter became public, the Hall of Famer said he was shocked; Hausfeld had never obtained his permission. "I don't know how he got my name to be part of that letter. I was never going along with this guy," says Bethea, who once served as the Oilers' player representative. He and Dryer, whom Bethea was told also supported the request to the AFL-CIO, wrote open letters challenging Hausfeld. Bethea asked for a retraction and an apology. Dryer wrote: "Knowing you as I do now, it is no surprise to me that you would misrepresent facts and the truth in order to manipulate a specific outcome."

Hausfeld says he was "sure" he had obtained the players' permission through DeLamielleure, whom he believed spoke for them. DeLamielleure said no such conversation occurred. "He's bulls---ting," DeLamielleure says. "I never told those guys to put Elvin's name on there. Never, that son of a bitch! Why would anybody ask me to put Elvin's name? This guy is unreal."

"I'm still waiting for my retraction," Bethea says. He says he became convinced that Hausfeld was trying to become the de facto representative of the retired players.

"Everything he was selling was snake oil," Bethea says. "He was going to cure everything."

In November 2012, the disagreements exploded at a status conference in Minneapolis before the magistrate judge overseeing the lawsuit. Hausfeld invited players he thought supported the settlement. That included DeLamielleure, who was still, tentatively, in Hausfeld's camp. Dryer, Bethea, Pastorini and the other original plaintiffs also showed up, with Stein and his colleague, Tom Ward. A pre-conference meeting, convened by Hausfeld for players who supported the deal, turned into a free-for-all. Ward burst in with Pastorini and lambasted Hausfeld, accusing him of holding "secret meetings." Players screamed at Ward. Mitchell, Hausfeld's paralegal, feared there might be a physical confrontation before order was restored.

The settlement ultimately went through; the judge who approved it described the deal as "truly one-of-a-kind, and a remarkable victory for the class as a whole." The original players continued to oppose it; more than 2,000 retired players ultimately opted out. No one has been paid, including Hausfeld, while the case is appealed.

DeLamielleure has kept a diary since 1983, and after the Minneapolis meeting he wrote: "I feel like I need a shower." Mitchell escorted Joe D back to the airport in a van. "I don't want to be used anymore," he told Mitchell. "I'm done." DeLamielleure hasn't talked to Hausfeld since.

"I felt bad because they used me to bring in a lot of guys," DeLamielleure said. "This was all manipulated to get the lawyers their money."

Bethea said he has some advice for any athlete who comes in contact with Hausfeld: "Run!"

FIVE YEARS AFTER entering the sports field, Hausfeld LLP is still waiting for its big payday -- or any payday, for that matter. Its greatest hope evaporated this year when the judge in the O'Bannon suit rejected the request for players to pursue damages as a class, which would have allowed them as a group to tap into billions of dollars from past TV revenues. At that point, the case became about changing the system. For a plaintiff's lawyer, the incentive to keep spending money and time on the case was greatly diminished.

Win, and all you get are your fees paid. Lose, you get nothing.

"He easily could have said, 'We didn't get it, good luck,'" O'Bannon says. "But he didn't. That's why I love the guy."

But there are ways Hausfeld could still profit, some less obvious than others. Beyond the more than $15 million he says the NCAA would have to repay his firm in billable hours and fees, he also could play a role in the business of college athletics, should the courts rule in his favor. In 2011, he registered a new organization, the Former College Athletes Association, with the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs in Washington. Its address was listed as 1700 K St., the headquarters for Hausfeld LLP.

From its creation, the exact nature and composition of the FCAA has been something of a mystery. The intent is to collect licensing revenue for players after their college careers, says Feinberg, who is helping organize the entity and, along with Vaccaro and Huma, was a founding board member. Hausfeld says he set up the FCAA as a vehicle for a potential settlement in the O'Bannon case, in case the NCAA agreed to distribute licensing revenue to athletes. He acknowledges that the organization could be used to market current college athletes should the regulations change. Hausfeld wants to be the FCAA's lawyer, which could put him in position to negotiate everything from TV contracts with ESPN to gaming agreements with EA Sports. "What the FCAA is saying is, 'We will go out and get enough of the athletes to create a critical mass so that if someone wants a group license we can deliver it,'" he says.

The FCAA's existence surfaced in a 2013 wrongful termination suit filed by Jon King, who for three years served as Hausfeld's lead investigator on the O'Bannon case. King claimed that, when asked about the FCAA by other lawyers at the firm, Hausfeld replied: "It's a revenue stream for us." According to the lawsuit, some lawyers expressed concerns that the FCAA created a potential conflict of interest by "creating a business that [Hausfeld] ultimately intended to be a for-profit licensing entity" and that he was using the O'Bannon case "to obtain that source of ongoing profits for the firm."

King had been fired on Oct. 3, 2012, for what he claimed were concerns he raised about potential ethical violations at Hausfeld LLP, including the FCAA issue. Hausfeld denied any improprieties and said King's dismissal was performance-based. The lawsuit was dismissed and sent to an arbitrator. Before a scheduled hearing, King surrendered. The agreement he signed -- and which was accompanied by an order issued by the arbitrator -- states that he "now understands that the claims previously asserted ... were incorrect" and "acknowledges that he has apologized" to Hausfeld and each of his partners. In an interview, King, who now works for a rival firm, said he dropped the suit because he feared he would be on the hook for more than $400,000 in legal fees if he lost. But he repeated his assertion that he and others felt Hausfeld's involvement with the FCAA was a potential conflict of interest.

Hausfeld says he has "no relationship economically" with the FCAA. Nor, he says, is it a "lock" that he will become the organization's outside counsel. "I'm floating just like anyone else," he says. But Feinberg concedes that Hausfeld is a favorite, given the sweat equity invested.

Hausfeld is also well-positioned to represent players in future sports litigation, including, potentially, hundreds or even thousands of individual cases that might grow out of the O'Bannon decision. In April, he announced that he and famed lawyer David Boies were forming a joint sports law group. Among other things, Boies and Hausfeld are seeking to become outside counsel to the NBA players' association.

Hausfeld says he is preparing his firm for transition to younger leadership. But he shows no signs of slowing down. Hausfeld might know little about sports, but his value to the case was put on vivid display during the O'Bannon trial, when he faced off against one of the NCAA's expert witnesses, James Heckman, a University of Chicago professor who has won nearly every major award in economics, including the Nobel Prize.

Heckman tried to assert that playing college sports does not hurt academic performance and earning power. Hausfeld produced a Knight Commission report showing that, in fact, star athletes are often admitted to universities with little chance of graduating and "are brought into the collegiate mix more as performers than aspiring undergraduates."

Aiming his bowtie as if it might squirt water on the witness, Hausfeld bore in. "Do you disagree with that representation of the Knight Commission?" he asked Heckman. "Yes or No."

Heckman refused to answer and, flustered, asked Hausfeld a question of his own. The judge, Claudia Wilken, interrupted. "The witnesses can't ask the lawyers questions," she admonished Heckman.

"OK, sorry about that, your honor. I'm not a professional witness," Heckman responded.

A member of Hausfeld's legal team slipped him a note: "He's toast. Get him off the stage."

But Hausfeld ultimately couldn't resist a parting shot. "Dr. Heckman, was there a typo in your report?" he asked. "Is your hourly rate $2,300?"

"Yes," Heckman acknowledged.

"I have no further questions, your honor," Hausfeld said.

Investigative reporter Paula Lavigne of ESPN's Enterprise and Investigative Unit contributed to this report.