Finally got around to reading that doozy of a Deadspin post by Barry Patchesky about sleazy baseball agent Dan Lozano, a USC dropout who used dubious methods to become one of the sport’s biggest power brokers, building a house of cards atop a three-legged table. An excerpt:

“With Lozano, that question is always there. Through the years, he has told clients and colleagues that his career began in 1990 as a kid fresh out of USC, where he played Division I ball and earned a law degree. Every part of that sentence is false. Lozano never passed the bar, never went to law school, didn’t even earn an undergraduate degree. He told USA Today that he was just one Spanish class shy of graduating, but he once told a co-worker he lasted only ‘a few semesters.’ (He also told USA Today he dropped out because he was ‘negotiating the biggest deal in baseball history.’ He was referring to Mike Piazza’s gargantuan Mets contract, which was signed nine years after he dropped out.) As for his boast of playing baseball for the Trojans? Longtime USC coach Mike Gillespie has no recollection of Lozano, and his name appears nowhere in a list of all-time letterwinners. It’s not for nothing that, according to colleagues, people in the BHSC office took to calling him ‘Lie-zo.’

If there’s one thing his superiors at BHSC did know, it’s that Lozano was good. He had a preternatural ability to meet a baseball player once and become fast friends. More importantly to his bosses and his bottom line, he had a knack for turning those friends into clients.

‘He was downright charming,’ says a former friend who watched the young Lozano’s stock skyrocket. ‘He said exactly what you wanted to hear, and he became who you wanted him to be. And he could move on to the next player and be a completely different person for them.’“