Trial begins for former UNM Lobos basketball operations director

The criminal case against a former University of New Mexico athletics employee involves allegations that Cody Hopkins used UNM funds to gamble at an Albuquerque area casino, a prosecutor told jurors on the first day of Hopkins’ embezzlement trial.

Hopkins’ attorney, Paul Kennedy, responded by telling jurors that what prosecutors call embezzlement was simply sloppy record keeping by a young man saddled with a difficult and complex job.

“It was his first big job, and he fell behind on bringing in his vouchers or justifying his receipts,” Kennedy said Monday in opening statements.

“As time went on, he couldn’t catch up, and so things got a little sloppy, things got a little messy,” Kennedy told jurors. “But in the end, Cody didn’t steal the money. Cody didn’t embezzle the money.”

Hopkins, 41, allegedly embezzled $63,000 in university funds during his tenure as operations director of the Lobo men’s basketball team. Most of the funds allegedly involved cash withdrawals from ATMs using a university-issued credit card.

The trial is scheduled through Friday in 2nd Judicial District Court before Judge Bruce Fox.

Prosecutors are expected to call as a witness Craig Neal, a former Lobo men’s basketball coach and now an assistant coach at Nevada, who served as head coach here while Hopkins was director of basketball operations.

Other likely witnesses include three former Lobo assistant coaches now working for other Division 1 programs.

Prosecutors with the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office allege that in the last six months of 2015, Hopkins withdrew more than $54,000 in cash from ATMs and made another $9,000 in purchases for his personal use.

Hopkins’ role as operations director was “pretty big and pretty vague,” Assistant Attorney General Andrew Coffing said in opening statements.

Hopkins’ job frequently involved withdrawing funds from UNM accounts to pay expenses for food, travel and recruiting using a UNM-issued credit card, also called a purchasing card or “P-card.”

“The process requires you to provide receipts or justification for any sort of expenses that come from this card,” Coffing told jurors. “And when he started to fall behind, that’s when things became a problem.”

Coffing said that on many occasions, Hopkins was unable to justify his expenses and cash withdrawals using his UNM P-card.

“Mr. Hopkins gambled at Sandia Casino in cash amounts, in and around the same amount that he had just previously taken out of the P-card account,” he told jurors.

Once, when Hopkins was told to reimburse UNM for a funding shortfall, Hopkins withdrew money from a UNM account to pay off the shortfall, Coffing said.

“When he started to fall behind, he started to use UNM’s money for his own purposes,” Coffing told jurors. “It was for his own personal gain.”

The allegations go beyond Hopkins being unable to validate or justify the expenditures, Coffing said. “There’s evidence that he actually used university funds for his own benefit on multiple occasions. It’s as simple as that.”

Hopkins is the second UNM athletics department official to stand trial this year for criminal charges.

A jury acquitted former UNM athletic director Paul Krebs in July of two counts of embezzlement in a case unrelated to Hopkins charges. Krebs’ charges stemmed from a 2015 golfing trip to Scotland for large donors that ran into problems with poor attendance and financial difficulties.

Hopkins, who now is a national basketball scout for JucoRecruiting.com and is based in Dallas, stepped down from his UNM job in December 2015 when UNM began investigating Athletics Department finances.

A UNM internal audit completed in 2016 found that athletics was aware Hopkins had withdrawn nearly $40,000 in cash from ATMs using his UNM P-card in the 2015 fiscal year, but never restricted use of his card despite not having proper reconciliation of those withdrawals.