by Glenn Stout
After his insulting welcome at the airport, Rostand says he had to endure neglect every night—no bed, sheets, blankets, or heat. “I was sleeping with my head on my baggage.”
In Cameroon, he says, “I lived in a normal house, sleeping in beds, like a normal kid, living a normal life.”
Meanwhile, according to the boys, Flint frequently threatened to pull players’ I-20s and constantly demanded money from Rostand and Stefan, despite having promised them full scholarships. (The amount, $25,680 for a 10-month term, was also noted on their I-20 forms.) After giving Flint several payments of a few hundred dollars, both say they simply refused, effectively calling Flint’s bluff on threats to send them back across the Atlantic.
Mahmadou regretted his trip from Africa almost immediately. For his first two weeks in America, he lived in Flint’s house with no adult there. The power went out for two days; he slept in the dark.
The French-speaking Cameroonian had little knowledge of Western appliances. One day, Stefan was on his phone and noticed black smoke billowing out of the kitchen. “He had put two pieces of bread in the microwave,” Stefan says, “and he put it on like five minutes.”
“I couldn’t read the instructions,” Mahmadou says. “They were in English.” They laugh about it now, but he nearly set the place on fire.
The worst was December, when Flint and his wife, Maria, left to take Faith Baptist North’s national team to play in the Under Armour tournament in San Diego and the Tarkanian Classic in Las Vegas. The boys remember the Flints dropping off two boxes of pancake mix and a small package of rice to the apartments. This was supposed to last two weeks. “It was gone in like a day,” Stefan says.
Attempts to reach Maria Flint through her cell phone and her email address listed on the Faith Baptist Christian Academy North, Inc., filings with the Georgia Secretary of State were unsuccessful.
The already skinny teenagers steadily lost weight. Rostand shed 10 pounds in three months. Mahmadou dropped seven pounds in a little over a month. And Stefan saw his weight drop from 200 pounds to 175 from July through December. At one point, Mahmadou nearly passed out after a four-hour practice. “I’d only had one McChicken to eat,” he says.
Aleksandar Cosic, another Serbian player who wound up leaving Faith Baptist North shortly after the Lake Wales boys, confirms the dire circumstances. “We were not getting food,” he says.
Nigerian players were in particularly bad shape. “Those guys were losing weight,” Cosic says. “One guy was 6'10", 240 or 250, but by the end of the year he lost 40 to 50 pounds.”
The two dozen or so boys living in the cul-de-sac apartments survived by combining resources. Stefan talked his parents into sending him $30 a week, which he pooled with his fellow Serbs to buy groceries. He and Franck cooked for the group.
Then they would go to a CiCi’s Pizza in a nearby strip mall and wait until closing time, when the manager would give them the leftovers from the buffet. Days were filled using the Wi-Fi at Starbucks and hanging out at LA Fitness, where the boys circulated free guest passes among the group and would sneak each other in.
Complaints about the conditions in Stockbridge and Conyers began to trickle south to the Sellars family in Ludowici throughout the fall. Dominican kids in Stockbridge began talking to their countrymen at Faith Baptist’s south campus, says Matthew Sellars. The DR players in Stockbridge reported sleeping on the floor, and that the power would cut off at night, and that they weren’t getting enough food.
“A lot of times, in programs like this, kids complain all the time,” Sellars says, admitting that he hadn’t personally visited the campus and had only seen it depicted on Flint’s website. “So I played it off.”
But the stories kept coming, now from Nigerians and Serbians at the north campus. Sellars says he confronted Flint about the players on the south school’s I-20s, telling him, “You’re treating them bad, and it’s going to make us look bad.” He says Flint responded by saying, “No, man. We’re doing the right thing.”
Pastor Sellars sent Flint a cease-and-desist letter on October 31, 2014, cutting official ties with the north campus, and relocated 15 kids out of Stockbridge to Ludowici.
Sellars says the south campus rescinded the I-20s for the students who didn’t transfer to Ludowici—which would have meant the remaining teens were technically illegal from November on, long before Stefan and the boys worried about their status on the ride to Lake Wales.
“We told George, ‘Look, by this date, we’re terminating the I-20s,’ so they probably did have a terminated I-20 as a result of his school not having SEVIS status,” Sellars says of the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System the government uses to track students, adding that Flint would not have had the authority or access to SEVIS to cancel the I-20s himself.
While the living conditions and the dispute with the sister campus led to Faith Baptist North’s downfall, the lack of coursework proved the final straw.
“The first problem was to go to school,” Mahmadou says. “I asked Coach George every day, ‘When do we start school?’ And he said, ‘The next week.’ ”
And every week, through November, December, and January, there was still no school. There wasn’t much basketball either. From the end of November through mid-January 2015, the schedule grew littered with cancellations—until there were more cancellations than actual competitions.
By the second week of January 2015, two of Flint’s coaches, Morgans and Gibbons, decided Faith Baptist North was untenable, both for them and the students still there. They hatched a plan to move players to schools where they could actually attend classes.
While Morgans was seen as Flint’s right-hand man, responsible for driving players to and from practice and trying to maintain some order in their living quarters, Gibbons was a retired coach who had won more than 450 games at NCAA Division II schools Florida Southern and Clayton State, in Georgia, and who was inducted into the Florida Association of Basketball Coaches “Court of Legends.”
From the beginning, Morgans says, Flint ignored his employees when he wasn’t micromanaging them. “You’ve got Gordon Gibbons, who’s a Hall of Fame college coach,” Morgans says, “and you’re telling him he don’t know what he’s talking about?”
Morgans says the only reason he and Gibbons stayed as long as they did was “to make sure nothing happened to them kids.”
Gibbons, especially, felt a responsibility to the half-dozen students—including Franck and Cosic—whom he had recruited to play at Faith Baptist North through his web of college and high school connections. Through Franck, Gibbons had gotten to know the other Cameroonians, Rostand and Mahmadou. Gibbons didn’t recruit Stefan, but he had grown close to him as he coached him on the high school team.
“We were all loving Coach Gibbons, who was a really great coach, and he was really caring about us,” Rostand says. Stefan says Gibbons was the only adult in Georgia telling them the truth. So when the coach pulled Stefan aside during a practice in mid-January and said, “There’s no future for you here, kid,” and told him he knew a coach at a public school in Lake Wales, the player replied: “Take me tomorrow.”
The Lake Wales boys weren’t the only players to bail on Faith Baptist North. Just about the time the boys were leaving, a group of Serbian immigrant families in the Atlanta area banded together to take several other Serbs from Faith Baptist North into their homes. Dragan Milakovic, a mining expert who lives near Atlanta, saw the boys’ living conditions.
“They got some macaroni in the morning . . . that’s all for them all day. They [the Flints] didn’t share heating, they didn’t share nothing.”
By contrast, Milakovic and his wife took in a pair of twins who came to Faith Baptist to play soccer, as well as Cosic. They helped Cosic transfer to Faith Baptist’s south campus so he could graduate in the spring, and Gibbons helped him get a college scholarship to Union University in Jackson, Tennessee.
Gibbons was reluctant to be quoted for this story, saying he
didn’t want to criticize Flint or Faith Baptist. He says he believes Flint had good intentions.
But he does offer this explanation for pulling the kids out of the school: “My role in moving players from Faith Baptist North to other schools was simply because I thought they needed to get in school so that they could finish a second semester, and I was not sure that was going to happen,” he says. “I found some schools that would take them.”
Moreover, “I just felt like there wouldn’t be a basketball environment for them,” he says. “That was what they came here for.”
When Gibbons called Randy Lee in Lake Wales and asked if he might help him out, Lee reflexively said yes. His late father, Jim, had been Gibbons’s best friend when Gibbons coached at Florida Southern in Lakeland, and Randy had grown up watching Gibbons’s teams and had grown close to the coach.
As the head basketball coach at Lake Wales High, a public charter school about 30 miles from Lakeland, Lee was in a position to help. He even had experience with international students.
Lee’s previous job was at Tennessee Temple, a small Christian college in Chattanooga. While there, Lee and his father started a now-shuttered business called Global Prep LLC, using the college’s K-12 academy as a landing spot for international players who paid tuition to hone their skills and academics.
Lee wanted to import Global Prep to Lake Wales and tried to sell Lake Wales principal Donna Dunson on the idea, presenting her with a 50-page business plan during the 2012–13 school year. Dunson listened but passed.
“I thought it could be a conflict of interest,” Dunson says.
It was against this backdrop that four tall kids showed up on the Lake Wales campus, seemingly from out of nowhere.
To the boys from Faith Baptist North, Lake Wales was a vast upgrade. They went to real classes every day. Though they couldn’t be part of the Lake Wales team, Lee allowed them to practice basketball. Most important, says Rostand, “People were caring about us.”
But there were still big problems. When they arrived from Georgia, the boys moved into a small house leased to the girlfriend of one of Lee’s assistant coaches. The boys shared the space with two single mothers, who had four young children between them. In a rough neighborhood, the house was crowded, and the boys slept in the living room.
“I was sharing a couch with a seven-footer,” Stefan says. “It didn’t really work.”
After a week of going to class, Rostand missed the next five school days with migraine headaches. “I was feeling really bad,” he says.
His absence triggered a visit by the Lake Wales High dean of students, Stacey Butcher, who immediately told them to pack their things. In a later report issued by the school, the living conditions in the house were described as “deplorable,” which Lee disputes.
In any case, the boys were on the move again. Now, so was the school. A call for help went out to the Lake Wales community, and parents in the school responded immediately. One parent knew of a vacant unfurnished house; another family, the Donleys, loaded up a trailer with furniture for the boys.
What David and Lora Donley gave the boys was reassurance, something they hadn’t felt in months. Rostand recalls the first day he met Lora, helping her unload the truck full of furniture and wondering about this woman who looked too young to be a mother.
“That day was funny,” he says. “She wasn’t knowing me, she wasn’t knowing anything about us, and she said, ‘Don’t worry. We will do something for you guys.’ And I never forgot about it. Never.”
Rostand’s deep voice and generally implacable facial expressions tend to hide his emotions. But they’re not up to the job when he’s talking about Lora. “Since that day,” he says, “I felt like I met with an angel here in the United States.”
A March 4 visit to Lake Wales High by Jon Morgans, Flint’s former right-hand man, triggered an investigation into how the boys had ended up at the school, first by detectives from the Polk County Sheriff’s Office, and then federal Homeland Security agents.
Morgans says he was only there to see how the boys were doing, and that he went to the school office and was invited into Lee’s classroom. He says he chatted briefly with the boys, who Morgans says asked to see him.
Lake Wales administrators saw it differently. In the school’s official report to the Florida High School Athletic Association, Dunson says, “I was alerted there was a man from the Georgia school on campus, and the boys did not want to see him.”
Lora Donley happened to drop in on the boys that day. As they sat in her car eating lunch, she says, one of them slumped down in the seat to avoid being seen by Morgans, telling her, “He’s probably here to get us.”
Events escalated quickly. Dunson questioned “why a total stranger from the Georgia school would show up on our campus,” and why Lee would suddenly help enroll four basketball players in the school without telling her personally. Lee says he had notified other school administrators and assumed Dunson knew.
The principal wondered if Lee was trying to build his old dream of Global Prep using these students from the Georgia school. Lee denies he had any plans to use the Faith Baptist North kids as part of an athletics program. “Our goal from the start, Coach Gibbons and myself, was to get them educationally in school,” Lee says.
Dunson disagreed. Less than a week after Morgans’s visit, she put Lee on administrative leave, and soon after that asked for his resignation. “Randy said, ‘I’m just trying to help them because this school is closing,’ and it may be true,” Dunson says, referring to Faith Baptist North. “But three Cameroonians and a Serbian? What’s going on?”
Lake Wales had opened an in-house inquiry into eligibility issues with the new students. Within days, her school was part of a much bigger probe.
On March 9, after having been alerted by Donley to Morgans’s appearance at the school and the boys’ situation, the sheriff’s detectives and state workers from the Department of Children and Families questioned Dunson and her staff at the high school. “I’m glad you’re here,” Dunson told them. “Help us solve this.”
On the morning of March 25, it was Homeland Security’s turn. Agents took the four boys out of school to interview them about Faith Baptist. Within hours, the federal government would step in.
Nothing much was happening in Ludowici, Georgia, on the afternoon of March 25, 2015, as Matthew Sellars coached his Faith Baptist Crusaders through a baseball practice. He noticed a couple of news crews on the street, but he thought they were there to get video of his squad, which had some talent that spring.
“And then, boom, all these cars pulled up,” he says. “And these guys got out—looked like anybody you’d pass on the street. Well, they were all federal agents from Homeland Security.”
Five in all, Sellars says. They searched the Ludowici campus founded by his father, the pastor, in 1979. A couple of dozen kids were living in the gym building and in adjacent rooms built onto the back. Fire officials shut down the gym for code violations and removed 30 students who were living there, placing them with the Red Cross. All with the cameras rolling.
Aleksandar Cosic, who had seen terrible conditions at Faith Baptist North, was there when law enforcement raided the Ludowici campus. Faith Baptist’s south campus wasn’t as bad as Faith Baptist North, but it was no picnic either. Cosic says dozens of teens lived in poorly ventilated rooms that surrounded the basketball court, and that he lived in a room that had no power for much of the day and night. Food was limited to two meals per day, according to Cosic.
On the day of the raid, Cosic spent more than two hours answering investigators’ questions about both schools. “Then they made us all, like 30 to 40 of us, sit on the bleachers,” he recalls. Officers read off a list of names of students who supposedly had I-20s from the Ludowici campus. “There was like 60 names, and there was only like 30 of us there.”
He recognized some of the names and knew that those players were in schools in North Carolina, Florida, elsewhere in Georgia—but
not in Ludowici. “I remember the agents were really surprised when they were reading the names,” Cosic says. “If they read your name, you put your hand up. But there was nobody to raise those hands, because they were not there.”
The agents were learning what dozens of foreign athletes already knew. An I-20 from Faith Baptist in Ludowici didn’t necessarily mean you attended school there.
A week later, 240 miles to the northwest, Homeland agents were searching George Flint’s home and the New Hope church property that had served as Faith Baptist North’s campus.
When a call went out to find furniture for four international students who’d hit some hard times and needed help, Lora Donley answered like she always does. “That phone call changed my family’s life,” she says.
When they met the boys, they were all polite enough. “It wasn’t until we started asking them questions that I realized something wasn’t right,” Lora says.
At the mention of Georgia, they shut down completely. Stefan explains: “I was very suspicious, ’cause I mean I come from a country like where everybody’s corrupted, and everybody just tries to look after themselves,” he says. “There’s not really people like her who just help people because they love to.”
The charity only grew. After Morgans’s visit spooked the school, everyone decided the boys needed an adult around. The Donleys stepped up. They had a nice house, with a swimming pool and a basketball court on five acres—plus a game room with a pool table. And an iron gate at the head of the driveway that nobody could get through. It was like George Flint’s brochure, only real.
Plus, there were kids. The Donleys had two teenage boys, Brandon and Chris, and two younger girls, Kaylee and Ally. Not one of them flinched at taking in the tall boys. “They had open arms,” David says.
They were already a close family. Now they were just a much bigger one. Still, the boys had issues. Most pressing was their immigration status, and their role in what would soon be a sprawling investigation. But there was also the matter of their athletic careers.
