The saga of Winthrop Intelligence, the company behind the popular college athletic department database platform Win AD, has taken a newly tragic turn.
Late last week, Drue Moore, a former sports lawyer who co-founded the Winthrop, was found dead in his home in Durham, N.C., which also served as the official mailing address for the company.
A spokesperson with the Durham police department said officers responded to a cardiac arrest call shortly after noon on Friday, whereupon they located the 55-year-old Moore deceased. The department is currently investigating the matter as a “non-criminal death,” the spokesperson told Sportico in an email. No other details were provided.
Win AD, a subscription software service that charges schools up to $14,000 per year, provides a suite of searchable databases extracted from over 150,000 public records, including athletic department employee contracts and various third-party agreements. It enables quick comparisons of, for example, coaching and administrative salaries across college sports programs. Launched in 2009, the product quickly became a must-have negotiation tool for college athletic directors and is believed to have reached nearly 80% market penetration among D-I schools.
Meanwhile, Ben Moore, Winthrop Intelligence’s other co-founder and Drue’s cousin, is facing an active bench warrant for his arrest after he was inadvertently released from jail last summer while serving time for a contempt-of-court charge stemming from the divorce proceedings with his ex-wife, Amy Elizabeth.
At the center of their marriage dissolution was a dispute over Ben Moore’s 50% stake in Winthrop Intelligence, which he claimed to have put in a Wyoming “spendthrift trust” benefiting their children, and for which Drue Moore was named trust protector. However, the judge overseeing their divorce ultimately determined that the asset had been illegally transferred out of the estate and ordered Ben Moore to pay $17.5 million to his ex-wife, almost half of which was based on the value assigned to Winthrop.
In 2023, Sportico published the results of a nine-month investigation that detailed how the reclusive Moore cousins went from building a multimillion-dollar college sports business to partnering with an ex-felon, Robert Scott Brooks, in what was alleged to be a convoluted asset-concealment and tax scheme, involving various shell companies, trusts, collusive lawsuits and bankruptcy petitions.
Ben Moore was introduced to Brooks in the mid-2010s at an entrepreneurs meetup in Boulder. By 2014, Moore and Elizabeth moved their family from Minnesota to Colorado so Moore could begin working with his new business partner on a commercial dishwasher project. Brooks previously served 11 months in federal prison for bank fraud.
Last July, Ben Moore was sentenced to a 30-day stint in jail for repeatedly failing to turn over discovery to Elizabeth that related to his assets in general, and Winthrop specifically. A district court magistrate ordered Moore to remain incarcerated until he resolved a remedial contempt charge by turning over the required discovery.
However, on July 31, he was released from custody “on error,” according to court records, prompting a bench warrant for his arrest to be issued on Aug. 14. The following month, a magistrate judge gave a temporary order regarding the custody of the former couple’s minor children, stating that Ben Moore was “on the run [and] his actual whereabouts are unknown.” In an order last month, he was denied all parenting time or decision-making rights until the warrant was resolved. A spokesperson with the Colorado judicial branch confirmed Tuesday that the warrant remained active.
Aaron Suazo, the attorney representing Ben Moore in the divorce proceeding, did not respond to an email and voicemail. Moore is also currently fighting a third-party subpoena of his cell phone as part of a separate action Robert Brooks’ former attorney, Andrew Quiat, brought against Brooks over unpaid legal bills. The attorney representing Moore in that matter, Glenn Merrick, did not respond to an email inquiry.
These latest developments offer new twists to a corporate narrative already rife with controversy. They also beg the question of who, exactly, is in charge of Winthrop, which appears to be a going operation.
Kevin Barefoot, the company’s longtime director of sales and public face, left in late 2021 for a job at Teamworks, where he currently serves as vice president of business development. Winthrop’s other veteran employee, director of operations Kevin Cohen, left in January 2024, according to his LinkedIn profile.
“I was shocked and saddened to hear the news,” Barefoot said of Drue Moore’s death, in a text message. “I will continue to be in prayer for his family, wife and two sons.” (Cohen did not respond to request for comment.)
After graduating law school at the University of Tulsa, Drue Moore worked as a sports agent and co-founded Beach Sports Group with famed entertainment lawyer Stanton “Larry” Stein. Moore later moved to North Carolina and took a job as general counsel for Total Sports Inc., the book publisher that eventually merged with Quokka. In an email to Sportico this week, Stein referred to Drue Moore as “a great lawyer and an even greater person.”
Records show Drue Moore maintained his California law license through this year.
Elizabeth, while testifying in the divorce case, described Drue as the person who conceived of the idea behind Winthrop Intelligence’s athletic department database.
Winthrop was registered as a Delaware corporation from 2009 to 2017, when it was domesticated in Wyoming—a state known for corporate anonymity. At that point, D. Scott Robinson began being listed as the company’s manager on its North Carolina filings.
Robinson is a tax and estate lawyer who runs the Wyoming-based Opes Law and also serves as of counsel for the Boulder, Colo. firm Berg Hill Greenleaf Ruscitti (BHGR).
In his online bio on BHGR’s website, Robinson is described as a “tax attorney known for his innovative and creative thinking and is often called upon by attorneys and other tax and estate planning professionals to help find solutions to the ‘it can’t be done’ problems.”
Since 2016, Opes has registered a number of Wyoming LLC’s tied to the Moore cousins, according to court and state records, and in April 2017, Ben Moore named Opes Directed Fiduciary Services as trustee of the trust he purported to have conveyed his Winthrop stake to.
In permanent orders issued on Nov. 12, 2021, the district court judge overseeing Ben Moore’s and Elizabeth’s divorce found that trust to be “illusory and fraudulent,” and accused the cousins of being “in collusion to hide assets” from both the court and the IRS.
“This case presents a unique problem to the court created by (Ben Moore’s) lack of disclosure and lack of credibility,” the judge declared, while issuing multiple contempt citations against him.
Despite neither cousin being publicly identified with Winthrop for years, Drue’s home address was still listed, as recently as last spring, as the company’s primary mailing address in its filings. Durham County property records show that in 2020, Drue Moore and his wife transferred the deed of their home, in equal half shares, to two Wyoming entities—which were both registered by Opes.
Robinson did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
In early 2022, Drue Moore registered a new company in Luxembourg called BWL Global, according to records filed with the European country’s business authority. Around the same time, Ben Moore registered a company called Product Consulting Services with the Colorado Secretary of State.
Last May, Ben Moore organized another Colorado entity called Product Consulting Services LLC, listing its address as a 6,000-square-foot home in Denver that he and his current wife were renting at the time. Later that month, a process server working for Quiat attempted to serve Moore’s wife, Julia Moore, at the residence. In an affidavit, the process service alleged that Julia Moore ducked into the home’s garage to avoid service, a claim she denied.
On Monday, Glenn Merrick, Ben Moore’s lawyer in the Quiat matter, filed a motion to quash or modify the subpoena of his client’s cell phone, arguing that it was overly broad.
“Ben has been involved in a highly contentious divorce proceeding within the time period specified in the subpoena,” Merrick wrote in the court filing. “He has had numerous oral and written communications with his counsel in connection with that divorce case.”
