Thousands lacking from NBA, NHL video games’ charity raffle. The place’d it go?

---

As cash disappeared from the 50/50 raffle, the raffle supervisor made massive money deposits into his private checking account. USA TODAY analyzed financial institution information, quarterly experiences and extra to observe the cash.

DENVER – Nearly 100 nights a yr, 1000’s of {dollars} in money poured right into a room the dimensions of a brush closet in downtown Denver’s Ball Arena.  

Each night time, Randy Kanai collected the money and stashed it in a protected.   

The cash got here from the charity 50/50 raffle held for a decade at Colorado Avalanche, Denver Nuggets, Colorado Mammoth and Colorado Rapids residence video games. As the state-certified raffle supervisor, it was Kanai’s job to make sure the cash reached its supposed recipients.  

Half the jackpot went to the winner. The different half was presupposed to go to charity – primarily the Colorado Amateur Hockey Association, the nonprofit USA Hockey governing physique that regulates the game within the state. Kanai was its president.   

The cash might have been used to offset the prices of a notoriously costly youth sport, wherein ice rental, tools and journey prices routinely exceed $10,000 a yr for a single little one. But as a substitute of going to the hockey nonprofit and its member groups and leagues, a USA TODAY investigation discovered that 1 in 3 {dollars} the raffle raised from late 2016 by 2022 was misspent or stays lacking.  

More than $300,000 was by no means deposited into the raffle checking account. Another $275,000 was paid to exterior teams with little or no connection to hockey. And $25,000 extra was spent on journey and leisure, together with $2,000 airplane tickets and season tickets to Nuggets video games.  

At the identical time cash was going lacking, Kanai made a string of enormous money deposits into his personal checking account, courtroom information present. Asked to elucidate them throughout an April 2025 civil trial – wherein he was discovered accountable for stealing cash from the hockey affiliation unrelated to the raffle – Kanai mentioned the money got here from baggage he discovered mendacity round his mother and father’ home.  

“I see exactly why it looks suspicious,” Kanai, who denies all wrongdoing, advised USA TODAY. “But I’m telling you, I operated that raffle the best that I could. I did the best job that I could with the resources that I had.”  

Kroenke Sports & Entertainment, which owns the National Hockey League, National Basketball Association, National Lacrosse League and Major League Soccer franchises that hosted the raffle at their video games from 2013 to 2022, declined to reply particular questions in regards to the raffle from USA TODAY. Its nonprofit arm, Kroenke Sports Charities, obtained a portion of the proceeds. 

“We have been dissatisfied and saddened to study what CAHA and its members have needed to endure by this course of,” Kroenke Sports & Entertainment communications director Jim Mulvihill mentioned in an emailed assertion. 

“The raffles in question were overseen by the former CAHA president who was the subject of the underlying litigation. All raffle proceeds received by Kroenke Sports Charities were fully distributed to our nonprofit charitable partners.” 

To track the raffle money, USA TODAY obtained and analyzed more than 3,000 pages of the Colorado Amateur Hockey Association’s bank statements, check images, tax returns, emails, court filings and quarterly reports to the Colorado Secretary of State detailing its raffle activity. The news organization spoke to dozens of hockey parents, raffle volunteers, state officials, attorneys and two accountants who signed off on the methodology.  

The investigation reveals how Kanai skirted the state’s charitable gaming laws for years while shortchanging the hockey families whose interests he was supposed to serve. It also raises the question of why the entities that oversee the nonprofit’s finances – the Colorado Secretary of State and USA Hockey – both failed to notice.  

State launches investigation 

The Colorado Amateur Hockey Association ran the raffle from 2013 to 2022 under a license from the Colorado Secretary of State, which regulates charitable gaming. 

A week after receiving detailed questions from USA TODAY about Kanai’s management of the raffle, the Secretary of State’s office on Oct. 23, 2025, launched an investigation into the Colorado Amateur Hockey Association’s “past operating practices.”  

“It is illegal to submit false information regarding charitable gaming activities to this office,” deputy communications director Kailee Stiles mentioned in an emailed assertion to USA TODAY.  

“The Department takes its enforcement role seriously, reviews submitted information to ensure compliance with Colorado law, and investigates failure to comply with the law whenever it has the basis and evidence to do so.”  

The Colorado Amateur Hockey Association will totally cooperate with the state’s investigation, Tom McGann, the nonprofit’s present president, advised USA TODAY.  

“Mr. Kanai has a demonstrated lack of transparency with both USA Hockey and former CAHA Boards of Directors,” McGann mentioned. “Similarly, his information sharing on the 50/50 Raffle which he operated was less than transparent.”  

Bill Brierly, the affiliation’s government vp, inspired county and state prosecutors to analyze its former president’s dealing with of the raffle, too.  

“If what you’ve found is true, then this is money that was diverted from CAHA that should have been used to make hockey more affordable and provide other opportunities for youth and amateur hockey players in Colorado,” Brierly mentioned.   

“It’s just not a proper way to be running a nonprofit.”  

Stacks of raffle money

When the 50/50 raffle began in 2013, it was clear the place the cash was flowing.  

But inside 4 years, cash began to vanish.  

The thought for the raffle originated with Kanai.  

A hockey mother or father whose youngsters performed in Colorado’s youth leagues, Kanai in 2009 co-founded a Tier I hockey membership – the highest degree of youth competitors. Three years later, he was elected Colorado Amateur Hockey Association president.  

Kanai approached Kroenke Sports & Entertainment with the concept quickly after he took workplace, he later testified in courtroom. Under their partnership, the hockey nonprofit would run the raffle and share the proceeds with Kroenke Sports Charities, the corporate’s nonprofit arm.   

The two organizations labored carefully with the Secretary of State’s workplace to ensure they complied with state legal guidelines, in accordance with a July 2013 report on the company’s web site. The workplace touted the partnership as a convincing success.   

Kroenke Sports Charities’ portion of the cash would fund sports activities applications for underserved youngsters, the report mentioned. The hockey affiliation’s share would go to native hockey groups and leagues and assist enhance its SafeSport program for safeguarding younger athletes from abuse.  

With greater than 100 residence video games a yr among the many 4 professional groups, the raffle rapidly grew into one of many state’s greatest charitable gaming operations. Fans purchased a whole bunch of 1000’s of {dollars}’ price of raffle tickets every year. Some swiped bank cards. Many paid money.  

Roughly as soon as each two weeks throughout the professional groups’ 2016-17 seasons, Kanai took stacks of raffle money out of the protected within the enviornment and introduced them to certainly one of two KeyBank branches inside 5 miles of his home in Wheat Ridge, Colorado, financial institution information present.   

There, he deposited the money into the hockey nonprofit’s segregated raffle checking account, the place state regulation required it to retailer all raffle income. It was from that account that the nonprofit paid the winners, charities and different raffle bills.  

Practically each penny was accounted for in financial institution statements that yr. But the subsequent yr, a spot began to look between the quantity the raffle recorded making and the quantity Kanai deposited.  

The hole grew for 5 years – and by no means closed.  

The raffle offered at the least $1.8 million in tickets from October 2016 by the final one in June 2022, in accordance with quarterly experiences Kanai submitted to the state and jackpot outcomes on the official raffle web site.   

But lower than $1.5 million was deposited into the raffle checking account throughout that point, financial institution statements present – a $300,000 shortfall.    

Kanai advised USA TODAY he was unaware of the hole. Almost each sport, $100 or $200 would go lacking, he mentioned, however he by no means calculated the full quantity misplaced over the 351 raffles in query. He prompt that the volunteer ticket sellers might have pocketed money, that it might have fallen out of their aprons, or that they didn’t flip in raffle tickets printed in error that ought to have been voided.   

Kanai mentioned he didn’t at all times depend the cash after every sport. Sometimes, he let it sit within the enviornment protected for weeks earlier than reconciling the receipts in opposition to gross sales.   

“Since I’m there every single night, I didn’t want to hang out there longer than I needed to, so I’d just gather up all the cash and credit card receipts and throw it in a safe and walk out the door without counting it,” he mentioned. “I didn’t reconcile every night. I didn’t have the staff to reconcile.” 

Kanai later added that he generally posted inflated jackpot quantities on the scoreboard at video games to spice up ticket gross sales, which he mentioned might trigger the net jackpot outcomes to be inaccurate. Still, it doesn’t clarify the $300,000 hole between the deposits and income figures he reported to the state, which he affirmed below penalty of perjury had been true and proper.  

Nonprofit officers have a fiduciary obligation to be good stewards of their organizations’ sources, mentioned Laurie Styron, the chief director of CharityWatch, a nonprofit that charges and investigates different nonprofits. If Kanai didn’t have the sources to handle the raffle correctly, he shouldn’t have run it.  

“This is just another example of someone running a nonprofit as if it’s their personal proprietorship,” Styron mentioned. “If you want to risk your own money, that’s your own business.  

“But this is not his personal money. This is the charity’s money.”  

Hockey orgs obtained a fraction of the cash

In the raffle’s first few months, the Colorado Amateur Hockey Association gave its whole share of the proceeds to its member groups and leagues.  

But by 2017, it stopped giving to its members virtually completely.  

Kroenke Sports Charities continued to get its share. But Kanai gave many of the hockey affiliation’s lower to a handful of youth baseball, softball and collegiate membership sports activities groups.   

For years, Kanai enlisted these exterior teams to promote raffle tickets at video games in trade for a roughly 15% lower of the jackpot. As a end result, $277,000 supposed for hockey households was as a substitute paid to non-member organizations with little or no connection to the affiliation’s mission of regulating and rising the game.   

Paying teams to employees raffles is prohibited below Colorado legal guidelines and the state structure, mentioned Stiles, the Secretary of State spokesperson. Only “bona fide members” of a licensed nonprofit can volunteer to work video games. No individual or group can obtain compensation for working. The whole internet proceeds have to be “exclusively devoted” to the nonprofit’s lawful charitable function.   

Twice within the final 5 years, Colorado voters rejected poll measures that will have amended the structure to let nonprofits pay raffle employees. Opponents argued that the measures would have diverted cash away from nonprofits’ core missions and made charitable gaming extra like “for-profit gambling.”   

By signing every of the Colorado Amateur Hockey Association’s annual raffle license renewal functions, Kanai repeatedly affirmed below penalty of perjury that he learn, understood and was chargeable for following Colorado’s raffle legal guidelines. Yet again and again, he continued paying organizations to promote tickets.  

The University of Denver and University of Northern Colorado membership sports activities departments every obtained $47,000 in raffle funds for working video games from October 2016 by 2022, quarterly experiences, financial institution statements and test photos present. Another $57,000 went to 3 youth journey softball groups. No one group obtained extra – $55,000 – than Centennial Panthers Elite Youth Baseball, a nonprofit with no web site and one officer, in accordance with its tax filings: a treasurer.   

Most of the Panthers’ whole price range in 2016 got here from the 50/50 raffle, its tax submitting that yr exhibits. It spent most of it on a weeklong, summer season baseball camp and event at Cooperstown Dreams Park, in the identical upstate New York city because the National Baseball Hall of Fame.  

Kanai doesn’t deny paying exterior teams to employees the raffle. He advised USA TODAY he did so to maintain the raffle alive as a result of hockey groups refused to volunteer. The Secretary of State’s workplace, he mentioned, knew and authorised of his observe of giving these teams “donations” in trade for promoting tickets.  

“I don’t ever recall sitting down and actually reading all the state raffle laws,” Kanai mentioned. “I was operating under the belief that the state knew what I was doing, and if I was outside of the raffle law, they would let me know. And that never happened.”  

Stiles declined to reply particular questions in regards to the Colorado Amateur Hockey Association, together with whether or not the Secretary of State’s workplace knew of the association. But the investigation discover the workplace despatched the nonprofit on Oct. 23, 2025, ordered it to protect all information on, amongst different issues, “remuneration.”   

“Colorado law and the state constitution prohibit direct remuneration to individuals or groups for volunteering to run charitable games,” Stiles mentioned. “Department staff regularly communicate with operators of charitable games to ensure that the legal and constitutional requirements are abundantly clear.”  

Kanai insisted that he stored the raffle going for the Colorado hockey neighborhood’s profit. Based on its contract with Kroenke Sports & Entertainment, roughly a 3rd of the online proceeds ought to have gone to the hockey nonprofit and its members.   

In reality, these hockey organizations obtained simply 7% – $124,000.  

“That’s $124,000 that they would not have had otherwise,” Kanai advised USA TODAY. “Had there been no raffle, there would have been nothing.”  

Raffle irregularities go undetected

The 50/50 raffle got here to a close to complete halt in March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down in-person occasions throughout the nation.   

The Colorado Amateur Hockey Association held a couple of online-only raffles by June 2022, after they ended. By then, the individuals charged with overseeing its funds had ample purpose to query Kanai’s practices.  

In 2018 and 2019, Kanai made a sequence of bizarre purchases from the raffle checking account that don’t seem to fall throughout the slender checklist of bills permitted below the state’s raffle legal guidelines, resembling promoting, tools and accounting charges.  

He spent $9,000 on airfare, accommodations and floor transportation for 3 separate enterprise journeys in 10 months, which he logged in quarterly experiences as “vendor meetings.” On one journey, he purchased two airplane tickets for $2,130 every.  

Kanai additionally made $16,000 price of purchases at a web-based ticket vendor for Avalanche and Nuggets video games and different occasions. He listed them in quarterly experiences as donations, describing one $5,460 transaction as “Nuggets season tickets for donations to charitable causes,” with out specifying what.   

The journeys had been for coaching hosted by the affiliation’s raffle software program vendor, Kanai advised USA TODAY. Some of the ticket purchases had been for sport tickets given out as jackpot prizes, he mentioned, whereas others had been for golf tournaments and galas hosted by Kroenke Sports Charities.   

He mentioned he didn’t recall what charitable causes the Nuggets tickets benefited or why the airplane tickets had been so costly. He later mentioned Nuggets tickets got to volunteer ticket sellers as incentives for working video games.  

The Colorado Secretary of State’s six-person bingo-raffle group is chargeable for reviewing 500-plus nonprofits’ charitable gaming experiences every quarter for inconsistencies, discrepancies and lacking info, Stiles mentioned.  

The group, nevertheless, didn’t flag the Colorado Amateur Hockey Association’s high-dollar journey and leisure bills, a whole bunch of “donations” to exterior teams that helped promote tickets, or the lacking $300,000. Nor did it discover that the nonprofit’s reported income and bills and its raffle checking account statements, which had been hooked up to every report, virtually by no means matched.  

Stiles declined to say whether or not the bingo-raffle group’s evaluation processes ought to have flagged the problems. The group didn’t obtain any complaints in regards to the hockey nonprofit or have any impartial purpose to audit or examine its authorized compliance, she mentioned, till USA TODAY raised the problems in October.  

The solely enforcement motion the state company took in opposition to the nonprofit, she mentioned, was issuing a Class 3 violation in 2014 for failing to maintain copies of raffle tickets. The Colorado Amateur Hockey Association paid a $50 positive.  

No one on the hockey nonprofit’s board appeared to note the problems, both. That consists of its longtime treasurer and secretary, Shawn Tanaka, who filed its tax returns every year, had entry to the raffle checking account and obtained $20,000 yearly from the affiliation’s essential working price range for “professional services.”  

Tanaka, who not serves on the board, didn’t reply to cellphone, textual content and electronic mail messages from USA TODAY in search of remark.  

USA Hockey – acknowledged by federal regulation as the game’s nationwide governing physique – is meant to conduct website evaluations of every of its 34 associates’ funds each three years. Despite reviewing tax filings as a part of the evaluations, USA Hockey doesn’t seem to have seen that the Colorado Amateur Hockey Association’s tax filings, financial institution statements and quarterly experiences all confirmed extensively totally different charitable gaming income figures. 

USA Hockey spokesperson Dave Fischer didn’t reply to a number of requests for remark for this story. 

It wasn’t a regulator who lastly seen the discrepancies. It was a neighborhood hockey mother.  

Concerned about conflicts of pursuits involving Kanai and different board members, Brooke Wilfley, who runs a hockey academy in Denver, personally employed an accounting agency in late 2022 to look at the affiliation’s funds. The agency’s January 2023 report discovered six-figure variations between its financial institution statements and inner books, “questionable raffle activity,” and monetary information it known as “illogical.”   

Only after receiving that report – and a whistleblower retaliation grievance from Wilfley – did USA Hockey rent an accounting agency of its personal to forensically audit the affiliation’s funds.   

USA Hockey’s accounting agency ordered Kanai to show over quite a few paperwork about each his personal enterprise and the raffle.  

Kanai refused to offer them. 

Wilfley mentioned she is grateful to USA Hockey for intervening and supporting her. But she mentioned there must be a greater system for rooting out dangerous actors in a youth sport the place, throughout the nation, companies and people are exploiting households for revenue.  

“Families give up everything for their kids to play, and these programs take advantage of them,” she mentioned. “Thousands of kids in our state are being impacted by the decisions that these people are making. And nobody’s doing anything.”  

‘Cash in baggage, simply sitting round the home’

Randy Kanai took the witness stand in Courtroom 550 of Jefferson County District Court, swearing to inform the entire reality and nothing but it surely.  

It was April 1, 2025 – his day in courtroom to defend himself in opposition to allegations that he had stolen at the least $180,000 from the hockey nonprofit he ran for over a decade.   

The Colorado Amateur Hockey Association filed a lawsuit in opposition to Kanai in October 2023, 5 months after the board voted him out of workplace. The lawsuit accused him of funneling the affiliation’s cash by his personal enterprise. Although it wasn’t one of many essential costs, it additionally accused him of failing to maintain sufficient information on the raffle.   

At the civil trial, Thomas Krysa, an legal professional representing the affiliation, questioned Kanai a couple of string of enormous money deposits into his private checking account in 2020 and 2021 – particularly, whether or not the money got here from the 50/50 raffle.  

Kanai mentioned it didn’t. The cash, he testified below oath, got here from baggage of money he discovered mendacity round his mother and father’ home after they died in 1997.  

“That was all cash that I was pulling from stuff that they had laying around,” Kanai mentioned.  

“I’m confused,” Krysa mentioned. “So your parents had a lot of cash in bags just sitting around the house?”  

“Yeah.”  

Reading from Kanai’s financial institution statements, Krysa rattled off 10 of the money deposits:  

• $4,000 on July 20, 2020.
• $4,000 on August 25, 2020.
• $3,960 on September 24, 2020.
• $4,000 on October 22, 2020.
• $4,000 on November 18, 2020.
• $4,000 on December 18, 2020.
• $4,000 on January 20, 2021.
• $4,000 on February 24, 2021.
• $2,000 on March 17, 2021.
• $4,300 on May 11, 2021.

“It’s not cash from the 50/50 raffle, right?”   

“No.”  

“Why were you depositing $4,000 at a time?”  

“It was just an easy way, the way my parents had the cash bundled.”  

Krysa requested if Kanai knew that banks should file foreign money transaction experiences to the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network after they course of money transactions exceeding $10,000.  

Kanai mentioned he was conscious.  

“Were you trying to avoid that?”  

“No,” Kanai mentioned. “If I would’ve been trying to avoid that, I would’ve put in $9,900.”  

Why wait 23 years to deposit the cash?   

Kanai mentioned he and his siblings put all the cash right into a protected in certainly one of their homes, “forgot about it, and just left it there.”  

“You forgot?”   

“Oh, we knew it was there, but there was no urgency to do anything with it.”  

“You didn’t want to earn interest on it?”   

“We had been incomes curiosity in different places, and no person wished to sit down there and take the time to deposit that.” 

“How much cash did you have in that safe at one time?” 

“I don’t know,” Kanai said. “Two, $300,000.”    

Six months after the trial, Judge Chantel Contiguglia issued her written verdict. It found Kanai liable for civil theft, unjust enrichment, conversion of funds and breach of fiduciary duty.   

Contiguglia ordered Kanai to pay the nonprofit $579,000 – three times the amount he stole, with interest – plus attorney fees, and turn over all his documents related to the nonprofit and its finances. The 47-page judgment, which centered on Kanai’s private business, did not mention the raffle.   

Kanai told USA TODAY he planned to appeal. He was disappointed with the ruling, he said, but will “sleep good every night knowing the truth.”   

That the cash he found in his parents’ house is about the same amount missing from the raffle fund, he said, is a “total coincidence.”  

“I’ll swear on a stack of bibles,” he said. “That’s not raffle cash.”  

Some of the money, he said, still sits in his personal safe. 

Kenny Jacoby is an investigative reporter for USA TODAY who covers college and youth sports. Email him at kjacoby@usatoday.com.