A Portland judge sentenced two men Tuesday to short prison terms for their roles in a conspiracy to sell hundreds of stolen limited-edition Nike sports shoes and ordered them to have no contact with the company’s employees or former employees.
Government prosecutors asked U.S. District Judge Michael H. Simon to sentence Tung Wing Ho and Jason Michael Keating to one year and one day in prison for their scheme to transport, receive and sell purloined promotional sneakers owned by Nike. Defense lawyers sought probation.
Simon sentenced Ho to three months in prison and Keating to six months.
“I’m extremely sorry for what I’ve done,” Keating told Simon during his sentencing hearing. “I want to apologize to Nike. … My greed got the best of me, and I lost sight of right and wrong.”
Ho went to work as a promotional manager at the shoe company’s world headquarters in Beaverton in 2012. There he handled “Look Sees” – sneakers intended for athletes, teams or other influential people. Collectors pay big money for them.
Ho and former promotional manager Kyle Yamaguchi, who had ordered the sample shoes from a Nike factory in China, conspired to sneak them off the Nike campus and sell them. Yamaguchi served as go-between in those sales, which is where Keating came in.
Keating, a Fort Myers, Florida, shoe dealer, paid $679,650 for more than 630 pairs of shoes that Yamaguchi and Ho stole from Nike between September 2012 and March 2014, according to an indictment.
“Because the shoes in question were produced in very limited runs and never for sale, they commanded prices from basketball-shoe collectors – so-called ‘sneakerheads’ – that were typically 5 to 15 times the retail prices for comparable Nike shoes,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Ryan W. Bounds wrote in court papers.
Nike’s internal security team cracked the sneaker scheme, backed by videotaped surveillance images, and forwarded evidence to the Washington County Sheriff’s Office.
Yamaguchi, who provided extraordinary help to government prosecutors, was sentenced to five years of probation.
— Bryan Denson
503-294-7614; @Bryan_Denson