Yamaguchi left Nike in 2012. He confessed he had ordered sample and promotional sneakers from a Nike factory in China where these shoes were intended only for star athletes, celebs or collectors.

He was replaced by Tung Wing Ho when he left, and Ho and Yamaguchi stole shoes between September 2012 and March 2014 to sell them to collectors.

They stole over hundreds of pairs and making hundreds of thousands in profit. Yamaguchi confessed to investigators and even provided a spreadsheet of his illegal transactions.

Because the shoes in question were produced in very limited runs and never for sale, they commanded prices from basketball-shoe collectors – so-called ‘sneakerheads’ – that were typically 5 to 15 times the retail prices for comparable Nike shoes.

Ho and another shoe dealer by the name of Jason M. Keating are scheduled for trial on April 21. Keating paid $680,000 for more than 630 sneakers to be sold to small businesses all over.

The sneaker industry is actually a very big one. It has grown into a 400 million dollar economy on eBay. Quartz say:

Today, the numbers point to a growing, and increasingly globe-spanning, population of eBay-enabled sneaker collectors. Their spending on sneakers purchased over eBay has grown by double-digit percentages each year since 2010. Last year about 6.3 million pairs of sneakers were sold on the site. Of those, 1.2 million were priced at $200 or more, pushing total sales of those pricier models past the $400 million mark, and making them one of eBay's top 10 fashion categories, according to Marcelle Parrish, eBay's head of fashion.

The collectible craze is led mostly with sneakerheads buying Nike Air Jordans.

In 2013, Nike Air Jordans accounted for $1 in every $3 spent on sneakers on eBay. Of the more than 1,300 sneaker models that sneaker-data site Campless tracks on eBay, eight of the top 10 models in terms of dollar sales between March 2014 and February 2015 were Jordans. All 10 of the top selling sneakers on eBay—including those Air Jordans—were made by Nike.