DALLAS — Multiple Dallas Mavericks sources said Thursday that people within the organization cautioned Dirk Nowitzki about his relationship with a woman who was arrested at the star forward's home Wednesday morning.

The team sources said Nowitzki's suspicion led him to question Cristal Taylor's past while allowing her to stay in his house. Her arrest on two warrants, stemming from a probation violation and a theft charge, occurred as the Mavericks flew back from Denver.

While many Mavericks fans probably regard the timing as awful, with Dallas trailing Denver, 2-0, in a second-round playoff series, the team sources characterized the news and timing as "good." They said Taylor had been a divisive influence between Nowitzki and his teammates and family members.

"It's pretty obvious that I'm going through a tough time in my personal life right now," Nowitzki, 30, said after practice Thursday. "Like I always have, I want to kind of keep my private life private.

"I really am not at the stage where I can talk about it yet and feel comfortable talking about it. I'm more than happy to answer basketball questions, but I think at this point, I just can't talk about it."

Taylor, 37, remained jailed Thursday night in Dallas County Jail with bail set at $20,000 on the theft of services charge and no bail allowed on the probation violation. She could face an extradition hearing in the coming days.

Taylor has a history of financial crimes and using numerous identities that dates back at least a decade and spans two states, records and interviews show. How much, if any, Nowitzki knew about her criminal history is unclear, but there is little doubt they had a close relationship.

When reached by phone in St. Louis on Thursday evening, Taylor's mother, Shirley, told The Dallas Morning News she did not want to divulge details of the relationship between her daughter and Nowitzki but characterized him as a genuine, intelligent and private person. She said he had met other members of her family.

Two local TV stations, KTVT (Channel 11) and WFAA (Channel 8), cited unidentified sources in reporting Thursday that Taylor had been engaged to Nowitzki and is pregnant with his child. Sources who spoke to The News did not, or could not, confirm her pregnancy.

"I'm not commenting on that," Nowitzki said, when asked about the reports.

Shirley Taylor said she was aware of neither an engagement nor a pregnancy. She said she speaks with her daughter frequently, and has done so several times since the arrest.

"I don't know what to think," the mother said, adding that she does not believe her daughter has had contact with the team or Nowitzki since the arrest. "It's like a nightmare to me."

WFAA obtained a Facebook page video that shows Nowitzki and Taylor hugging in a kitchen, purportedly in his Preston Hollow home, valued at $6 million. When the Mavericks hosted Phoenix in an April 5 regular-season game, Taylor sat next to Nowitzki's father, Jorg, who was visiting from Germany.

Nowitzki, with dark bags under his eyes, said Thursday that he is "trying to focus on basketball as much as I can," emphasizing that he is looking forward to Saturday's Game 3 at American Airlines Center. "I'm a warrior. I'll be ready to play."

After making a brief opening statement, Nowitzki said he would take only basketball-related questions. After seven minutes of talking about the Denver series, Nowitzki abruptly ended the interview session when a WFAA reporter asked why he had not bailed Taylor out of Dallas County jail.

Meanwhile, new details about Taylor's past emerged Thursday.

In early 1999, she pleaded guilty to separate charges involving writing bad checks in two St. Louis-area counties.

The first case was in suburban St. Charles County. Taylor had deposited at least $600 in bogus checks with a Mercantile bank, said St. Charles County Prosecuting Attorney Jack Banas. She then went to an ATM and withdrew the funds.

"She retrieved it before they found it was forged," Banas said.

Taylor pleaded guilty to four felony counts, including forgery and stealing, and was put on five years' probation. She used the name Crystal Ann Taylor in court, with an address in St. Louis. But she went under aliases as well, Banas said.

During the same time, she was prosecuted for a similar felony in neighboring St. Louis County. She again pleaded guilty and received probation.

Records in the St. Louis County case list her date of birth as 1970, rather than 1971, and her address as Friendswood in suburban Houston. A Crystal Ann Taylor using the same details pleaded guilty to a 1994 felony forgery charge and was put under house arrest, records show.

Shirley Taylor said she was not aware of her daughter using aliases and said the Missouri offenses were old and a product of her youth.

"She was young," the mother said. "She really got herself together, (and she is) just a whole different person."

By 2000, she was reporting to a probation officer in Texas who supervised her here on behalf of Missouri authorities. She picked up another charge involving bad checks, Banas said, putting her back on his office's radar. He said he was unclear where the arrest happened.

Taylor also failed to report to her probation officer following the arrest, as required as part of her sentence. The officer notified Missouri prosecutors, who then sought to revoke her probation and obtained an arrest warrant months later in 2001. She could face prison time if the judge decides to revoke her probation, Banas said.

"That was the last we heard of her until now," Banas said.

Meanwhile, Taylor was cited in Harris County for failing to identify herself to a police officer. She pleaded guilty in the fall of 2000 and was fined $200.

That was merely the first of her legal issues in Texas.

Texas run-ins

Authorities say Joel Smith, a dentist in Beaumont, met Taylor when she came in for some dental work in 2004. Smith said the woman claimed to be a student at a local school, Lamar University. She presented a driver's license with the name Christian Travino. She also presented a credit card.

"When we first ran it, it declined," Smith said.

The dental office had her call the bank, and she was able to straighten it out.

"We had quite a few conversations with MBNA about this, and they said, 'Oh, that's a mix-up. It was just the amount we were putting through,"' Smith said.

The woman was a patient there for a couple of weeks, racking up about $10,000 worth of charges, Smith said. Then the credit card company denied payment.

"We went for four or five months trying to collect the bill," Smith said, "writing letters, that type of thing, and then she sort of disappeared."

That's when the dentist went to police, providing them with a photo of his patient.

Beaumont police Officer Randy Stevens took the case. When he and other officers saw the photo, they recognized the woman as the suspect in an investigation they had conducted a year earlier.

"She was kiting checks, she had stolen a guy's credit card, and what we found was that she was a waitress at a local men's club," Stevens said. Shirley Taylor said she would be surprised if her daughter was an exotic dancer and said her daughter did secretarial work.

The Beaumont investigators obtained her application and other documents she had submitted to serve as an employee for a sexually oriented business. Stevens said when they returned to the station, they made a discovery.

"The driver's license was fake, the Social Security number, the names, all that was fake," Stevens said.

Officers went to an address and found a boyfriend she had been living with, Stevens said.

"All the information he knew was fake," Stevens said. Either that or the boyfriend was lying — the investigators couldn't tell.

"It was like she didn't even exist," Stevens said. "So with that case, it never went anywhere."

But after the dentist came forward, the investigators got all the information they had collected and sent it to a regional crime information center in Nashville, Tenn., for help. The center found Taylor's arrest in Missouri.

"They sent me a mug shot of the girl," Stevens says. "I could tell from that photo that it was all the same person."

Seen at games

In 2006, after police were still unable to locate her, Jefferson County authorities indicted Taylor on a charge of theft of service in the dentist's case.

"I know that we're probably not going see any of the money," Smith says. "But I'm just glad maybe she'll be off the streets."

Stevens says he guesses other victims will come forward once they see Taylor's photo in the newspapers.

"I think there's going to be other charges on this since it came out on the news," the officer says. "She's going to be in jail for a while, I think."

Mavericks sources confirm that Taylor has been a presence at games for most this season, Nowitzki's 11th in the NBA.

How much, if any, distraction this will cause remains to be seen. During last year's first-round playoff loss to New Orleans, teammate Josh Howard publicly discussed his marijuana use and attended a birthday party against then-coach Avery Johnson's orders.

"Obviously, very disappointing what happened in the playoffs — bad timing," Nowitzki said at the time without mentioning Howard by name. "I think in the playoffs, it's really time to focus on basketball and not let distractions come up."

Nowitzki said then that he tried to keep the team together and playing hard, "but it wasn't good enough."

Obtained in a 1998 draft-night trade, Nowitzki arrived as a 19-year-old wunderkind and blossomed into the NBA's 2006 Most Valuable Player.

During an interview with The News before the 2007 season, he said he never wanted to marry before age 30, adding "I always leave the future open, but obviously I don't want to be a 40- or 45-year-old (new) dad, so I'm sure in the next five or six years, something's going to happen."

Shortly before leading Germany into last summer's Beijing Olympics, Nowitzki told a German publication that he had a girlfriend. He did not reveal her name, but the admission made national news in Germany.

It isn't clear whether Taylor was the girlfriend to whom he was referring.