Nike’s Beaverton, Oregon, headquarters. Photo Credit: Gary Halvorson
A longtime Nike music supervisor and an alleged co-conspirator are facing felony racketeering and aggravated theft charges for allegedly slapping the athleticwear company with inflated bills en route to stealing over $1 million.
Local outlets including Oregon’s FOX 12 were first to shed light on the straightforward alleged scam, after a Washington County grand jury indicted both defendants in May.
The first of those defendants is John Griffith, Beaverton-headquartered Nike’s ex-head of global brand marketing, music supervision, strategy, and licensing.
(Doesn’t that mean Griffith was an exec? Not according to Nike, which in a statement downplayed his position as “a business affairs role that included music licensing responsibilities,” emphasizing for good measure the belief that he wasn’t “an executive at the company.”)
Per what appears to be his IMDb page, Griffith’s music supervision work for Nike – in his own words, he spent “15 years leading the music supervision effort at Nike” – extended to spots such as “A Feel for Every You,” “Dominate All Dimensions,” and “Skates.”
And these adverts, for their part, synced tracks recorded by Sudan Archives, Vaughan Mason & Crew, and Travis Scott, to name a few.
As described by prosecutors, Griffith decided to squeeze a bit more – like over $1 million more, as mentioned – out of the plum gig.
This leads to the second defendant, alleged Griffith co-conspirator Brad Mosher, whose LinkedIn profile points to a role as president of a licensing agency called Good Measure. Per Fox 12, Nike was Good Measure’s sole client.
Undeterred by the distinct possibility of leaving behind a massive paper trail, Griffith and Mosher allegedly conceived the brazen scheme and decided to “just do it” via a minimum of 11 fraudulent transactions involving $50,000 or more apiece.
With that, the former defendant allegedly set inflated prices for the latter to bill Nike. The multibillion-dollar company is said to have coughed up the payments without a second thought – at least between June 2020 and December 2022, when the defendants allegedly pocketed north of $1 million.
From there, Mosher is said to have kicked back a portion of the allegedly ill-gotten gains to a shell company controlled by Griffith, who, incidentally, doubles as the founder of a Portland-based online record shop called LIMINAL Music.
All told, each defendant is staring down 24 identical felony charges, chief among them two counts of racketeering.
In a statement, Mosher attorney Chris Heywood indicated that his client had been cooperating with authorities from the get-go; Griffith’s attorney, Kristen Winemiller, described her own client as “proud of what he has accomplished for the brand.”
A couple uncomfortable closing questions: Just how prevalent are similar kickback schemes, especially those involving less conspicuous sums? Adjacent to the consideration, Michael Smith is now scheduled to be sentenced in October for pocketing millions in royalties from billions of bot-powered plays on AI-generated tracks.
But the alleged fraud definitely doesn’t end there. Several civil suits have identified alleged largescale streaming fraud schemes benefiting high-profile acts; it was only last month that Spotify removed 500,000 fake plays from a well-known track; and fraud is rampant across AI uploads, according to Deezer.
Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean that additional criminal charges are on the near-term horizon. However, given the scope of the newer fraud allegations – some resting on a solid foundation of hard data – the possibility is worth keeping in mind.