Over the past few years, Nike has gone to rather extreme legal lengths to protect its brand and ensure no one outside the company can make any kind of bank off the iconic name, but now, we’re learning someone in the company wasn’t just raking in millions of dollars at Nike’s expense, but also exploiting his position at the Swoosh brand.
According to Fox 12 Oregon, Nike’s head of Global Brand Marketing, Music Supervision, Strategy and Licensing, John Griffith, was arrested after authorities alleged that Griffith and his friend Brad Mosher stole a cool million dollars from Nike over a two-year period as part of a kickback scheme during which he picked and chose which music vendors were hired by the company. Both Griffith and Mosher were indicted on 24 counts each, which included racketeering, aggravated theft by deception, and money laundering.
As to how the two-man operation worked, authorities say that Brad Mosher owned a music licensing consultancy called Good Measure LLC, whose only client was Nike. His inside man Griffith would then would set inflated prices for Mosher’s company and foot the bill to Nike, who would of course pay them without question. Mosher would then funnel half of those payments back to Griffith via his own shell company, Quiver and Bow LLC.
Honestly, it was a pretty clever scheme given the circumstances, but everything done in the dark will always come to light, and now both Griffith and Mosher are set to pay the piper for their transgressions.
Per Fox 12 Oregon:
Washington County Deputy District Attorney Carlos Catibayan described it plainly in a court filing this week.
“Between June 20, 2020, and December 28, 2022, Bradley Mosher and John Griffith conspired to operate a criminal enterprise to steal over $1,000,000 from Nike through an orchestrated kickback scheme,” Catibayan wrote in a declaration supporting a motion to consolidate both cases for a joint trial.
The scheme allegedly ran for more than two and a half years — from June 2020 to December 2022 — with prosecutors identifying at least 11 separate fraudulent transactions, each involving $50,000 or more.
Naturally, Nike is looking to have its million dollars returned (chicken feed to such a conglomerate, but a lot of money nonetheless) while Brad Mosher is already looking for a way to possibly throw Griffith under the bus to save his own hide.
In a statement to FOX 12 Thursday, Mosher’s attorney Chris Heywood confirmed that his client had cooperated with investigators: a detail that may explain why Mosher’s bail was set at just $5,000, a fraction of Griffith’s $100,000.
“This is a complex and far-reaching case,” Heywood said. “From the outset, Brad Mosher offered his full cooperation to both Nike and law enforcement. To this point, that cooperation has occurred in private. We now look forward to defending him publicly.”
No trial date is set, but one thing we do know is that Nike never loses a case. Ever.
Good luck with that, y’all.
