By Alex Prewitt September 19, 2019 This story appears in the Sept. 23, 2019, issue of Sports Illustrated. On the morning he learned his bank account had been drained, Rashad McCants couldn't afford doughnuts. As a rookie at Timberwolves training camp in the fall of 2005 it was his duty to snag a couple boxes of breakfast treats before practice, as assigned by the team's unquestioned alpha, Kevin Garnett. So when the 21-year-old guard reported to the locker room empty-handed—unable to cover even a single cruller—he got blasted with a KG earful. "No way you don't have money," McCants recalls Garnett barking. "I'm not trying to hear that s---!" McCants was baffled too. Six months after leading North Carolina to the NCAA title as a junior and declaring for the NBA draft, at which the T-Wolves took him at No. 14, he'd just received the first check from his $1.54 million rookie deal. Even after some admittedly lavish splurges, though—a Range Rover, a $5,000 Brioni suit and various Louis Vuitton items—he knew there was no chance he'd already blown through six figures. The rookie's financial hit would be softened when Garnett wired him $10,000 to cover expenses until the next payday, but McCants still remembers the wrenching realization that came when his agent confirmed the disappearance of more than $200,000, with only one plausible explanation for where it could've gone. It's the same gut punch that would be felt over the next decade by doctors, lawyers, at least four other athletes and one aerospace engineer, all of them ensnared in the same tangled criminal saga that would stretch from Texas to Florida, Saudi Arabia to North Korea. "I was like, 'Peggy?'" McCants says. "'What? How?'" The sizzle reel was making the rounds. This was 2011, a time when reality TV was dominated by docusoaps starring sports wives and members of the Kardashian clan, and here a refreshingly unique proposal was stirring interest among agents and network execs around L.A., as much for its supporting cast of high-profile athletes as for its charismatic, extravagant, unapologetic protagonist. Meetings were taken at VH1 and Oxygen. A pilot was ordered at BET. A pitch document suggested a working title: The Peggy Show. Recurring characters would include Peggy's orthopedic surgeon husband as well as the man she called her "little brother," Elkin King, who was COO of her emerging sports management empire. But everything would revolve around the queen. As the first page of the pitch document outlined, beneath a picture of a middle-aged black woman with a pearly white smile, tasteful highlights in her blown-out brown hair and a face that reminded one of her ex-husbands of Halle Berry: Peggy is the owner and CEO of King Management Group. She is the business manager to 31 professional athletes who look to her to help controlling [sic] their financial lives. Money is usually the least of the partnership. Peggy has been known to furnish homes, buy engagement rings and deal with endless baby mama drama. Known as "mama" to her clients, she works with some of the biggest names in sports. https://www.si.com/nba/2019/09/19/a...ign=social-share-article&utm_content=20190921